Get Learning! Online, easy wins for your career (heritage learning special)

This a living document that we’ll add to over time. Last updated: October 5th, 2020

Whether you’re an old hat or just starting out, online talks and courses are just so invigorating! Use them to get (re)motivated, remind yourself of key concepts or just for interest’s sake. This post emphasizes heritage learning. Want more? Head to our more general post about online courses Get Learning! Online, Easy Wins for your Professional Development.

In this post, by ‘learning’ we mean the ‘informal learning sector’. This is your area if you want to work with learners of all ages and settings, from schools to public engagement. Job titles include Learning Officer or Engagement Officer. There are quite a few of us out there who specialise in archaeology, and more who focus on heritage and/or museum learning.

Courses and Training

This is a wonderful course that I took – and I can’t recommend it enough! Linnaeus University Historic Environment Education Part I is theoretical and the following 6 months (Part II) are practical. You get undergraduate-level credits for both. Oh, and it’s taught in English and you get to learn about and see Swedish archaeology. If you can’t take the course, please use the link above to download the course syllabus – just to get the list of heritage-education reading.

Museum learning people are the professional family to archaeology learning, and its definitely worth keeping up with what is happening in the museum world. I have taken and can recommend these courses:

We love GEM (Group for Education in Museums). They offer really fantastic training and events, including a training programme. I took the Heritage Interpretation course in 2020 and really enjoyed it.

The Museum as a Source and Site for Learning (Future Learn) is essential for those of us in Scotland because it provides expertise for where we live and work. It is provided by the University of Glasgow, in particular the MSc in Museum Education tutor team, and Glasgow Museums.

There are a host of museum + classroom courses:

Behind the Scenes at the 21st Century Museum (University of Leicester)
Teaching Historical Inquiry through Objects (Edx and the Smithsonian). I enjoyed this one, about the benefits of hands-on learning, something we do a lot with in archaeology and museum learning (think: object handling kits here). It’s aimed at teachers in the States and therefore serves as a crash course into their primary education requirements, also. Handy if you’re an international student or move to America.
(Coursera) Art and Inquiry: Museum teaching Strategies for Your Classroom

Related to working with audiences, I recommend this excellent course on the psychology of lifelong learning: How We Learn It is taught by award-winning lecturer Psychology Professor Dr. Monisha Pasupathi . She has a lovely pace that makes the information easy to remember. There is an interesting mix of terms and real-life examples. Some of my favourite episodes are: ‘Myths About Learning’ and ‘Why No Single Learning Theory Works’, and’ Cultivating a Desire’ to Learn. This course is worth getting the 14-day The Great Courses free trial for. You can either watch each episode as a video, or simply listen along to the audio file (which you can speed up or slow down). The only thing I would flag up is that some of the psychology tests done to/on animals, in particular the older studies (Pavlov! I never knew!), and the some older studies on children, can be distressing to hear about.

That’s it for now! I’ll update it as and when I learn about more.

Posted by: Rebecca Boyde. Last updated: October 5, 2020.

Cover photo Photo by David Travis on Unsplash

Blog author Rebecca Boyde is the Youth Engagement Officer at Archaeology Scotland and coordinates the Heritage Resources Portal. Views Own. Contact: heritageportal@archaeologyscotland.org.uk

Archaeology Scotland

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