HELP project ICOM | Museum Digital Education

HELP a project on museum digital education evolution during the pandemic emergency. HELP – Heritage Education New Web Formats And Free Licenses Opportunities For Dissemination, Co-creation And Open Data is one of the 8 projects selected by 2021 Solidarity Projects of ICOM. The lead of the project is ICOM Italy, the other partners are ICOM Czech Republic, ICOM Portugal and the ICOM Working Group on Sustainability. 2021

Sarah Dominique Orlandi – ICOM Italy Project coordinator

The aim of HELP project is to guide museums through a self-assessment process and to support them into the realisation of digital projects for heritage education, based on open licenses. The pandemic emergency forced museums to create innovative participatory and inclusive ways to involve visitors online? In the era of global content sharing, are museums sufficiently aware of the extraordinary opportunities in terms of cultural, social and economic development that derive from the adoption of open licenses?

Output: 

• 14 free online lesson help to improve open access approaches and participatory opportunities
• 2022 Final Report download on Zenodo platform
• Research result webinar May 17, 2021 Streaming on ICOM Italy you tube channel

Project objectives:

• Museum education innovation path
• Digital experimentation in the Covid period: selecting better ideas for the post-pandemic
• Bring out advantages and opportunities of free licensing and public domain for audience engagement
• How to encourage active participation and reuse of digital reproduction of museum’s collections by a correct legal approach
• Open data as an opportunity for museum education and communication

Project phases:

• Phase 1 is dedicated to research and analysis for identifying best practices and verifying their applicability to a wide range of museums.
• Phase 2 provides online large-scale training (MOOC – Massive Online Open Course).
• Phase 3 launches a call for selecting museums and providing them with legal, technical and educational consultancy to support them in a concrete project.
• Phase 4 is dissemination: all final outcomes will be released in CC BY SA 4.0 available to the community.