Edward and Betty Marcus Digital Education Project

In the first Marcus Fellows grant to the North Texas Institute for Educators on the Visual Arts 14 years ago, the Fellows accepted a technological challenge. In collaboration with the Dallas Museum of Art, they developed an interactive CD-ROM to teach fifth graders about art. In more recent years, nearly every proposal to the foundation has included elements of technology. Today, through Marcus Foundation grants, Texas museums routinely send curriculum-basedart lessons electronically directly into classrooms, collaborate with teachers across the state to develop lesson plans, and deliver those plans via the Internet to teachers whose schools are often too far from a museum for field trips.

That tradition has continued with the 2006 launch of a major new programmatic endeavor, called the Edward and Betty Marcus Digital Education Project for Texas Museums. The singular focus of the effort is to stimulate visual arts education in Texas by increasing the capacity of Texas museums to use digital storytelling tools and techniques. Over a two-year period, the project goals are to:

1. introduce Texas museum professionals to Pachyderm 2.0, an open-source authoring platform, and related digital production tools;
2. help them learn to use these tools to tell media-rich stories related to their collections and exhibitions on the Internet or in the museum;
3. pay for some equipment needed to take full advantage of the capabilities Pachyderm offers;
4. stimulate collaboration among the community of museum professionals interested in digital delivery of visual art education;
5. give 25 Texas museums access to a national community interested in digital education.

The New Media Consortium is managing the project. Texas museum professionals have received scholarships for custom-designed hands-on training support for certain software and equipment installation including servers, access to help desk and support resources, and subsidized participation in a national community of like-minded professionals working in universities and museums. In addition, the project has hosted two major conferences on digital media in arts education and subsidized the registration fees for participating Texas museum professionals.

Now entering its third year, and with the five original project goals successfully met, the project aims to establish a collection of high-quality, museum-authored digital educational materials that are offered under a broad use license designed to enable their use by any educational agency within the state of Texas. In 2007-2008, more than 30 such materials were created and placed in a special online portal. Beginning in the fall of 2008, another round of projects will be underway that will be added to the portal, growing the collection and increasing the reach of each museum’s educational offerings throughout the state.

It is the hope of both the Marcus Foundation and the NMC that the design for this project will be seen as a model for other states. To that end, project participants have ample opportunities to present papers at national conferences and symposia.

First and foremost, however, the primary beneficiaries are the Texas museum community -- museum professionals, visitors, teachers and children -- who through this project can share and enjoy the rich collections of Texas art museums more effectively and easily than ever before.