Online courses – MOOCs: Massive Open Online Courses – have become a popular means to access information freely, explore new subjects, update one’s knowledge, and learn something new.

In the past months, Cultural Studies Professor Fred Truyen has been organizing the online course Europeana Space: Creative with Digital Heritage. The mission of this MOOC is to show how people can become creative with Europeana and digital cultural content, to demonstrate what Europeana can bring to the learning community, and to bring about the essential concept that cultural content is not just to contemplate, but to live and engage with. This is an extremely topical subject since the online availability of digital cultural heritage keeps growing; it is therefore more and more necessary that users, from passive readers, learn to find, understand, reuse and remix the online resource in an active and creative fashion.

The course feeds into the experiences of the Europeana Space (E-Space) Pilots and brings you the results of their research, analyses and test cases. The educational idea behind the E-Space MOOC is to lower barriers to the access and reuse of cultural heritage content on Europeana and similar sources, providing tutorials and trial versions of applications and tools alongside with reading materials and useful tips and best practices gathered during the course of the project.

 

Pick one of these inspiring modules, or just take them all!

Photography: In this module you will learn how to create your own stories with vintage photographs online, using Europeana and other open content, and remixing it with personal narratives and images.

Open and Hybrid Publishing: In this task-based module you will learn how to put together an online book by studying aspects of Photomediations: An Open Book as a case study. Materials included in this session range from online articles on photography and other arts, some visual material, to guidance notes about the use and reuse of CC-licensed material, Open Access and Open and Hybrid Publishing model. The most exciting part of this module is a freewheeling and playful challenge exercise which involves students reusing and remixing pre-existing material from Photomediations: An Open Book in order to create their own resource.

TV: Europeana Space developed a series of multiscreen applications for TV, focusing on reuse scenarios of cultural heritage. You will learn different ways in which archive footage can be re-used online, which formats exist, and which technology and coding languages can be utilized to make video available in a TV setting.

Dance: The E-Space Dance Pilot MOOC offers a series of activities for learners at different stages, ranging from undergraduates to PGR students, to showcase and encourage uptake of the dance pilot tools. The activities will enable learners to build personal dance collections on selected themes and discover how an online annotation tool can support the creation and analysis of dance.

Museums: This module will help you designing web-based and mobile services tailor made not only for the visitors but also for museums and memorials staff, especially for those who are in charge of  designing educational paths, by sharing lessons learned and best practices.

IP for the Cultural Entrepreneur: This module will guide you through the process of managing intellectual property rights from an initial idea through to a start-up business. You will learn how to develop a clear strategy when it comes to intellectual property rights associated with digital cultural content and its commercial re-use. You will be introduced to E-Space tools and case studies which will demonstrate how to clear copyright, source open re-usable content, carry out IP audits and risk assessments, and how to approach licensing and the IPR associated with hackathons, business modelling and incubation.

Creative Marketing: The aim of this module is to stimulate creative ideas on communicating cultural contents with the use of new media and to show how a greater audience can be reached by combining the power of social media and storytelling and how audiences can be better engaged.

 

Whether you are a student or teacher with an interest in cultural heritage, a GLAM professional, a developer or a cultural heritage amateur, this MOOC is for you. Every module is in fact organized on three levels in order to satisfy the needs of all the learners:

• Students or teachers? Or just a culture fan? The information provided here concerns digital cultural heritage in a broad sense; different kinds of content are presented and it is explained how to easily reuse them. No technical skills or understanding of the underlying mechanisms of the cultural sector are needed for this level of information.
• GLAM professionals (galleries, libraries, archives and museums). The information provided here presuppose a professional knowledge of the sector. The aim is to help GLAM professional discovering and understanding useful tools – such as those on the E-Space platform and Europeana Labs – that can be used to enhance, remix, rethink, play with collections in new and fascinating ways.
• Nothing of the above: you are a serious developer! This is the most technical part of each module and it is intended as a way for developers to discover the tools they can work with (e.g. the multiscreen toolkit, the Europeana APIs, …)

 

The Europeana Space MOOC Creative with Digital Heritage is planned to take place during the first semester of 2016/2017 academic year and will begin the 10^th of October 2016. The enrollment has opened this month on the KU Leuven channel of the edX platform.

Digital cultural heritage is online and ready to be creatively reused: enroll now and start learning!

Fred Truyen and Clarissa Colangelo