Open Forum

Hello all,

I have one more question for the day. I am working with a museum that is developing online curriculum to be used pre-visit or possibly independently of a museum visit as well. Besides tracking page visits, have you found a way to see if teachers are actually using curriculum, how they are using it, and/or if it positively affects student learning?

Thanks!

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Alyssa Boge
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I wish! If you find any good models, let us know.

We started a google form that's embedded in our website that asks teachers to provide their information, but is not currently required to download the curriculum. It currently has no responses, however :/

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Alexander Tronolone
Senior Educator
Brooklyn Historical Society
Brooklyn NY
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Creating online curriculum is a great way to help educators to do pre-visit or independent visits. There are three pieces that are required however for this to become successful.

1. You need to have a place to host them online, it should be open and intuitive, and easy for users to engage with it. Complicated signups, spam messages, or Captcha's tend to make users turn away

2. The content needs to be helpful and wanted by the educators/pre-visitors. This is difficult, teachers tend to look for content that is not only engaging for their students but also a time saver for themselves. Lesson plans, homework printouts, interactive lessons and a way to integrate it into their current lesson plan is all really important to help ensure what you make is actually going to be used.

3. As for analytics and feedback, you should provide a two way channel for educators to make suggestions, ideas, feedback, and you can gauge interest/usage by building in a way to collect the teacher name/school. Maybe surveys on how many students, as well as tracking the different pieces they are visiting, if it's online homework, how many students are completing their work, and average time per lesson to completion. How many lessons are being abandoned, and how many times teachers sign up and don't use it. This helps you determine how to build better tools/information for them :). 

Let me know if you have any additional questions, I'm happy to go into more specifics!
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Zachariah Reiner
Product Lead
Cuseum
Boston MA
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Its one thing to track a visitor to a page but to know if they used the material is another.  Requesting feedback could help (another user suggested this) but you will always have the issue of not getting any feedback.

What about creating a free eCommerce site, teachers would have to sign-up/sign-in and download files as a user.  On the back-end you will be able to see who downloaded a PDF and because they signed in you have the "Product" and email of that user so you can then follow up with them.  This is similar to what Amazon does when you make an order and you get emails asking for feedback or they try to push other products.

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Raymond Stivala
Manager of Web/Multimedia Development
The Newark Museum
Newark NJ
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Alyssa, we have an online previsit experience for both teachers and students that is evaluated by an outside evaluator. It sounds like you're measuring the use of lesson plans by teachers which is different but there may be a few ideas you could use. Our evaluator used a pre/post survey for students and another for teachers against a set of learning outcomes. We call our model The Flipped Museum based upon the blended learning model The Flipped Classroom. We just piloted the second program using this model and were published in this month's JME article which focuses on distance learning. Here's a couple links with more info:

We Flipped Our Museum - Here's What We Learned

'Flipped Museum' Pilot Upends Traditional Field Trip Model

Hope this helps!

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Michelle Harrell
Acting Director of Education
North Carolina Museum of Art
Raleigh NC
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