Digital (Education) Platform

Digital Platforms are online infrastructures that enable interactions between users and include search engines (e.g. Google and Bing); social media platforms (e.g. Facebook and Twitter); digital chat and instant messaging platforms (e.g. WhatsApp and Slack); videoconferencing services (e.g. Zoom); and websites and media hosting platforms (e.g. YouTube or Vimeo).

A Digital Education Platform (DEP) is digital platform that is specifically aimed at education providers such as primary and secondary schools. They typically comprise a suite of applications that are used to enable some form of remote, distance, blended or hybrid learning learning.

Digital education platforms may offer numerous benefits to museum educators, either in terms of the opportunities they can offer through their learning programme or their own professional development. Advantages for museum educators may include:

Accessibility and Reach

Digital platforms can enable museums to reach a wider audience, transcending geographical limitations and offering access to educational resources and experiences to learners around the world.

Content Creation and Curation

Some platforms provide tools for content creation, allowing educators to develop multimedia-rich resources that enhance engagement and interactivity. They also enable educators to curate and share existing digital content, such as images, videos, and articles, tailored to their educational goals.

Collaboration and Communication

Digital platforms facilitate collaboration among educators and students, fostering meaningful interactions and knowledge sharing. They provide discussion forums, chat features, and virtual classrooms, enabling educators to engage learners in interactive activities, group projects, and peer-to-peer learning. This is a particularly powerful benefit for museums as, implemented appropriately, they can empower, enable and encourage participants to engage with their stories in different ways and over longer periods beyond the usual confines of a museum-based learning activity.

Assessment and Feedback

Many digital education platforms offer built-in assessment tools, allowing educators to create easily administered quizzes, assignments, and interactive assessments which provide immediate feedback to students, and can be used to track progress, and enable data-driven insights that may be of use to participating students, their teachers, and the museum itself.

Next Steps:

1. Identify some different Digital Education Platforms and try to gain some experience with using them. It might not be obvious where to start with this, but some DEPs are actually very similar to digital platforms that you are already used to. For example, many schools use either Microsoft Teams or Google Workspace which are almost identical in practice to the commercial versions used by many business, including museums.
   
2. Taking part in online training courses on any subject will give you experience using a DEP as a student, and some courses can be found which aim to help educators make the most of specific platforms. Some places to start looking for courses include Alison, OpenLearn and Coursera.
3. Seek out and attend webinars and workshops on related topics. These may be organised by educational technology companies, individual museums, or professional organisations such as GEM.
4. Join and participate in online networks and communities that focus on themes that you want to target in your professional development. Many such networks can be found on social media platforms and through professional organisations that you may be a member of.
5. Any of these steps may help to introduce you to peers who are trying to develop their own knowledge and skills in similar areas, or who may have complementary experience to your own. Being open to (or proactively seeking out) collaborative projects with other museum educators may help you to discover innovative ways to leverage digital education platforms to extend and improve your museums' educational offers.

Further Reading:

• In the Glossary: | Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) | Distance Learning | 
• Elsewhere online: | Digital Platform (Wikipedia) | Enhance: Digital Teaching Platform (ETF) |