Introduction

The MOOC Open Digital Cultural Heritage (Avoin digitaalinen kulttuuriperintö) is multimedia in its approach, with both originally produced video and video from open sources, as well as literature for students to read, and activities to complete.

The primary philosophy behind the development of this MOOC is openness: this is both in the sense of the open digital resources with which the MOOC familiarises students, and in terms of the MOOC’s content itself. All the videos are available openly for anybody to watch (regardless of whether they are formally registered on the course) and we have strived wherever possible to ensure that the required and recommended reading is open access.

The MOOC is intended to create a familiarity and confidence among humanities students and practitioners with exploring and using open digital heritage resources. This includes gaining confidence in exploring this open data, and in being critical about both its functionality and its limitations.

We worked closely with current cultural heritage professionals working with digital heritage, and had a core team of three (Suzie Thomas, Maija Paavolainen and Annemarie Willems). In addition, Heidi Kovanen will be responsible for the delivery and evaluation of the course in Autumn 2019.

Intended audience

The MOOC’s content is open access, with the possibility of doing assignments to earn study credits available through completion as part of a university degree programme, or as an Open University course. Although the content is in effect available to anyone, we anticipate that most people taking this course will either be at university, studying courses as a pathway to university studies, or cultural heritage sector professionals seeking Continuing Professional Development opportunities. The course is put together with Humanities students particularly in mind, as a means of introducing them to digital cultural heritage resources in Finland.

Learning Goals

Students taking this course will fulfill the following learning goals:

• To become familiar with Finnish key digital cultural heritage collections including the types of material and metadata that is kept in digital archives.
• To learn procedures of searching datasets, extracting materials and working with different formats.
• To evaluate practices and procedures concerning digital cultural heritage collections and ethical principles surrounding them.
• To consider and critically assess current debates in the literature concerning open digital cultural heritage.
• To evaluate digital cultural heritage materials critically from the viewpoint of their potential for research and other purposes.

Timeline

The course was created over several stages, as summarized below:
● March 2018: First project meeting
● June 2018: filming
○ Filming contract with a private company
○ Thematic interviews with experts
● July 2018: editing material
● September 2018: building the academic content
○ Assignments, literature, group features
● Oct / Nov 2018: meeting teachers from other Universities
○ Feedback on the content and workshop
● Dec 2018: ”Digijoulu” celebration
● Summer 2019: translations into Swedish and English
● Period II 2019: pilot run