Three Years After COVID, 81 of 100 Museums Kept Digital Programs - But Training Lagged
Museums are designed around physical presence. Their power lies in the encounter between visitor and artifact, specimen, or living animal - an immersive, multi-sensory experience that produces a sense of wonder that reshapes how people understand the natural world. That designed experience depends entirely on visitors walking through the door.
In March 2020, roughly 90% of museums, zoos, and aquariums worldwide closed those doors simultaneously. The pandemic forced institutions that had built their entire educational model around physical presence to reach audiences they could no longer see, in a medium most had barely used, with no established body of research to guide them.
Megan Ennes, associate curator of Museum Education at the Florida Museum of Natural History, had been studying this gap for years before the pandemic made it urgent. She distributed a baseline survey on museum distance learning in February 2020 - one month before the shutdowns - creating an accidental pre-pandemic baseline against which she could measure what followed. Follow-up surveys in 2020 and 2021 tracked the immediate response. A fourth survey in 2023, now published in the Quarterly Review of Distance Education, assessed what remained after the crisis ended.
What Survived
Of 100 survey respondents in 2023, 81 were still offering online programs. Institutions that built digital programming under duress chose to maintain it after in-person operations fully resumed. The reason appears partly structural. During the pandemic, museums formed partnerships with schools serving the estimated 55 million American students who suddenly needed digital content - K-12 online enrollment jumped from approximately 1 million to 55 million students practically overnight. Of the 81 institutions still running online programs, 89% were offering school programs designed for K-12 students.
The Transition Was Genuinely Difficult
The shift from in-person to online delivery is not simply a change of venue. Ennes used the analogy of a classically trained pianist being asked to become a violin virtuoso by tomorrow: the underlying theory is shared, but the practical execution requires entirely different skills. "A lot of them love museum education because it's hands on and engaging. You are getting visitors to interact with real artifacts or animals. All of a sudden, it was a one-way transmission," she said.
In the absence of research specific to museum distance learning - virtually none existed before 2020 - educators improvised. Most initially used social media, which already had audiences attached. Teleconferencing software like Zoom quickly supplemented that, simplifying coordination logistics while doing little to help with content creation for a new medium.
Training Gaps That Persisted
Fewer than 15% of respondents had attended professional conferences on the topic. The same proportion reported receiving no training at all on how to deliver online programming effectively. More than half wanted additional professional development but had not received it. "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," Ennes noted.
The result is a cohort of museum educators delivering digital content with skills developed largely through trial and error, without the professional support structures that higher education built for online course delivery over two prior decades. The study's four-wave structure - baseline before the pandemic, two surveys during, one after - is its primary contribution to a thin research literature, capturing change over time rather than a single snapshot. Isabelle Gain of the University of Florida co-authored the study.