JISC

Object Based Learning for Higher Education (OBL4HE) will create a range of online educational resources for university teachers and students based around the use of museum collections and archival material for enhancing learning. OBL4HE builds on the pioneering work undertaken at UCL on object based learning in the higher education context and the museum-based undergraduate teaching developing research skills at the University of Reading through the CETL-AURS. The use of objects in museum collections and archives encourages active engagement from students, provides an opportunity to develop critical thinking and research skills and can help students through difficult areas of knowledge. This is true across all disciplines. The collections that will be drawn upon are rich and diverse including rare zoological specimens from UCL’s Grant Museum and Reading’s Cole Museum; Ancient Egyptian artefacts, Greek Archaeology, social and rural history archives and collections from the Museum of English Rural Life and Old Masters from the Art Museum at UCL.

The project partners are UCL and the University of Reading, who will also work with the Collections Trust. The project began on the 1st November 2011 and will complete by the end of January 2013. All of the educational resources will be open access under a Creative Commons licence and are intended for others to use and adapt for their own purposes in the education sector.

By January 2013 the project will have delivered a Source Base of around 140,000 digital objects (photographs of museum artefacts or scanned archival material), which will be searchable and accessible for researchers and teachers in universities (and further education institutions) in the UK. OBL4HE will also have created up to 18 educational resources tailored to the needs of students taking specific courses in higher education, but open to adaptation and use by others for different courses at other institutions. The resources and Source Base will be usable from within the virtual learning environments Blackboard and Moodle and all the digital objects will also be transferred to Culture Grid, which is an accessible database of collections from museums and galleries around the UK. The work undertaken for this project will, therefore, contribute to the Nation’s growing digital resources for teaching and research.