The Penn Museum has partnered with the Barnes Foundation, a Philadelphia art institute, to license a virtual platform for examining artifacts as part of the museum’s online archeology program this fall.
The tool — called the Visual Experience Platform — was developed by the Barnes Foundation to offer 360-degree views of galleries and collections and to allow students to interact with artifacts by digitally zooming in on details. The Penn Museum will be the first organization to license the technology.
Jennifer Brehm — the Merle-Smith Director of Learning and Community Engagement at the Penn Museum — wrote a statement to The Daily Pennsylvanian explaining the platform's "innovative features," including a "deep zoom" option that allows online learners to interact with artifacts.
“Instead of remaining static images on a slide seen on other online platforms, these world wonders can come alive as students zoom in with 360-views in real-time, revealing extraordinary details typically not visible as a one-dimensional representation," Brehm wrote.
The Penn Museum is set to utilize VXP as part of its four-week online courses in October — called the Deep Dig program — and in its virtual lecture series in November — titled "Archaeology in Action."
The museum launched the Deep Dig program in June 2020 as a means of continuing its educational initiatives during the COVID-19 pandemic. The program initially offered opportunities for archival research to a cohort of 55 students — with archeology professor C. Brian Rose teaching the first online class — but has grown to serve 575 students across six different courses.
Brehm described the platform as an effort to “[elevate] the virtual learning experience for our students” and “meet the needs of our growing audiences” across both Deep Dig classes and Archaeology in Action, which offers up to nine lectures to more than 1,000 attendees per season.
The Barnes Foundation first employed VXP in its courses in January 2023. Since then, the foundation has enrolled almost 4,600 students across 110 online classes, according to the announcement of its partnership with the Penn Museum.
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VXP can be accessed through smartphones and tablets and offers an “explore” feature for independent research. Both asynchronous and synchronous modes are available.
As part of the collaboration, members of the Barnes Foundation can enroll in the museum's Deep Dig courses with a tuition discount of $50. The same discount will also apply for Penn Museum members seeking to enroll in online classes at the Barnes Foundation.
The Penn Museum is set to showcase the VXP platform in September during a virtual discussion with Megan Kassabaum, the co-curator of the museum’s Native North American Gallery, which is set to open in November.
“No other tech platform as we know it offers the VXP’s ‘explore’ mode that could open a whole new way of learning about archaeology and stories of our shared humanity across 10,000 years of history,” Jo Tiongson-Perez — the Penn Museum’s chief marketing and communications officer — wrote in a statement to the DP.
“With exponential audience growth for virtual programs like Deep Dig since its 2020 launch, this partnership enables us to optimize experience while continuing to expand access,” she continued. “We’re grateful for this opportunity.”
