36 months later: Distance learning in the wake of COVID-19

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The COVID-19 pandemic had an immediate effect on how educators at museums and science centers interacted with their audiences. Many began offering online programming for the first time while simultaneously grappling with budget shortfalls, staff layoffs and low morale. Two inquiry-based studies had previously tracked the application of distance learning in museums. In a third study, recently published in the Quarterly Review of Distance Education, researchers assess the state of online museum programming three years after the pandemic’s onset to find out what worked and what didn’t. The results are mixed. Digital programming was a success for most museums, to the extent that they were still being offered two years after businesses re-opened. Others reverted to in-person education only. Everyone agreed there were several challenges associated with the transition and that further training and professional development are needed to improve content and delivery. Gainesville, Fla --- To enter a museum, zoo, or aquarium is to participate in an immersive experience, one intentionally designed to shift a visitor’s frame of reference to ensure every encounter is approached from an unfamiliar angle, every sight viewed from a new perspective. Exhibits are visceral and whole-bodied, confronting all five senses in a sequence arranged in the way that best conveys meaning and directly connects visitors with the object of their attention, with as few filters between them and it as possible. People have varied reactions to such encounters, but a common response is a sense of wonder. Adults often feel like children again, and children feel right at home.

To do this well, museums and other public spaces of interactive learning rely to a great extent on the physical environment into which they welcome visitors. That’s why they were hit especially hard when, in March of 2020, the World Health Organization declared the many international outbreaks of COVID-19 to be a global pandemic, and all services besides those deemed essential were shut down. Roughly 90% of all museums, zoos and aquariums closed their doors to the public, and in an impossibly short amount of time, educators at these institutions had to figure out how to reach an audience they could no longer interact with onsite.

“A lot of them love museum education because it’s hands on and engaging,” said Megan Ennes, associate curator of Museum Education at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “You are getting visitors to interact with real artifacts or animals. All of a sudden, it was a one-way transmission.”

Inflection points like these often follow a predictable pattern. The initial response is to use whatever resources are immediately at hand before shifting to something better suited for the task once it becomes available and feasible.

According to research conducted by Ennes and recently published in the Quarterly Review of Distance Education, museum educators did just that at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“A large number of respondents said they were trying to do programming through social media because that was something they already had in place, and they already had audiences associated with those spaces,” Ennes said.

Teleconferencing software like Zoom quickly stepped in to pick up the slack. For institutions that could afford it, this simplified the process of online event coordination, but it did little to reduce the burden of using a new medium for content creation. It was as if a classically trained pianist had been abruptly asked to become a virtuoso at playing the violin, preferably by yesterday. All the musical theory and notation is the same, but the simple act of playing a tune on one or the other requires a different set of motor skills.

To make matters worse, museum educators were mapping new frontier. Distance education in museums and other science centers wasn’t unheard of before the pandemic, but it was less common. There was no shortage of research on how to effectively convert in-person college courses to online lesson plans, but practically nothing existed on how to do the same with museum content.

That is, incidentally, how Ennes first became interested in the topic.

“It occurred to me that there was next to no literature on how museums were engaging in online learning,” she said.

Intending to contribute to the literature herself, Ennes distributed a distance learning survey to her peers in science centers across the U.S. in February of 2020, one month before the pandemic. The survey was initially meant to provide a brief look into the ways in which museum educators were offering online programming, who their primary audiences were and the types of content they were teaching. After everything shut down, Ennes realized she’d also created a baseline against which she could measure the effect that a once-in-a-century outbreak had on the ways in which people taught and learned about the natural world.

She sent follow-up surveys in 2020 and 2021 in which she asked respondents about the challenges they were facing in the thick of the pandemic and whether distance learning had emerged as a panacea or as a problem that needed to be abided until normal in-person operations could resume.

The results of the present study come from the fourth and final survey she distributed in 2023. In May of that year, the World Health Organization officially declared an end to the pandemic, and Ennes wanted to know how things had shaken out. Had there been enough incentive for museums to keep their online programs once they were no longer a necessity?

Apparently, yes. Of the 100 people who responded, 81 said they were still offering online programs. Of these, most (89%) were school programs designed for K-12 students, which isn’t an accident.

Another common pattern during periods of rapid and drastic change is partnership. Practically everything gets upended during a pandemic, creating gaps where none existed before. One of the larger gaps for museums was the absence of an audience. Meanwhile, public schools desperately needed digital content for all the students that no longer had the benefit of a classroom.

In the U.S., an estimated 1 million students were enrolled in online learning courses before the pandemic. COVID kicked that number up to 55 million practically overnight. Teachers were confronted by the same problem stalking museum educators: What works well in person is very often insufficient or impractical online.

Museums stepped in to help, with freshly made educational content tailored for the many students who’d suddenly found themselves stuck at home.

“In some places, people were able to come together and say, ‘Hey! This is a whole new world. Let’s figure out what we can do successfully.’”

That’s not to say there couldn’t have been improvements. One of the main challenges educators reported on in the survey was a lack of training.

“Less than 15% were able to attend conferences, and the same number of people said they don’t get any training on how to do online programming. They all felt that they were good at teaching online, but more than half of them wanted more professional development.”

Moving forward, Ennes said research like this will be a crucial component for making online museum programming more effective at reaching and engaging virtual audiences.

Isabelle Gain of the University of Florida is also a coauthor of the study.

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