Barnes Foundation Online Learning Platform Expands to Pennsylvania Museum
The Barnes Foundation, a Philadelphia teamed up with the Penn Museum to expand its online learning technology this fall.
The Visual Experience Platform (VXP), developed by Barnes, will teach visual materials to K-12 students and adults, and will host the Pennsylvania Museum’s “Deep Digging” course and virtual lecture series “Archaeology in Action”.
On VXP, those who register can interact with digital images, enlarging them into details that are not always personally visible. This feature allows for deeper interaction with art and archaeological works. VXP is beyond the scope of personal work and also offers a 360-degree museum gallery landscape and a searchable complete class library.
So far, Barnes has been using VXP for live and on-demand online courses and its educational programs. As part of these on-demand courses, there are about five videos, each about 10 minutes long, allowing students to translate and interact on the surface of digital images.
A series of interactions that connect topics and courses to content in the collection, multilingual videos are also available for free on the platform for students aged up to 10th grade. Topics include pigments and processes (5th to 8th grade), illustrations (2nd to 4th grade), and Spanish and French learning (7th to 10th grade), as well as corresponding worksheets.
Additionally, Barnes has released art integration classes for teachers who want to learn how to use art to support classroom learning in other course areas.
“Barnes has been teaching about art for over 100 years, and when we transferred classes online in 2020 to respond to the pandemic, we realized that if we really want to provide a meaningful educational experience about art, or if we do have any visual media, we need a platform designed specifically for their research,” Thom Collins, executive director and president of Barnes Collins, said in a statement.
Since launching the program in January 2023, Barnes has recruited nearly 4,600 students in more than 110 online courses, with 14% of whom have received scholarships.
“VXP is the first platform to provide a truly interactive experience in online research in art and visual media,” Collins continued. “It won’t try to replace in-person experiences; instead, it can enhance this experience, leveraging technology to explore art and visual media in ways that cannot be achieved in person. We are pleased to expand the use of VXP through this new partnership with colleagues at the Pennsylvania Museum, which will allow more students to learn using our immersive platform.”
The Pennsylvania Museum is the first institution to acquire the technology, which will launch cultural and educational courses and lectures on the technology in October and November.
Through this partnership, members of Barnes will receive a $50 discount in their classes, and members of the Pennsylvania Museum will also be eligible for the same discount for online courses offered by Barnes.
“The Penn Museum is pleased to work with other prominent cultural and educational institutions, such as Barnes, to provide our in-depth excavation courses and archaeology lectures on its innovative VXP platform,” said Christopher Woods, director of Penn Museum in a statement. “Optimizing online learning experiences for our audiences can enhance our mission to expand our shared human story and make archaeology and anthropology available to all.”
Will Cary, Barnes’ chief operating officer, added: “We are delighted to start licensing this pioneering software so that other organizations can achieve these goals as well at critical moments in the field.”
This partnership between the two institutions was at a critical moment when funds for the arts and education programs were cut by the U.S. government, and people of color belonged to the most intense people.
