EPICS: an e-learning platform for digital cultural heritage

We present a new type of e-learning platform for digital cultural heritage in Flanders, focusing on user-driven and meaningful digitization of cultural heritage information. This approach was developed within the EPICS project, which ran for two years and came to an end in the fall of 2011. The combination of recent digitization in the cultural heritage sector and the growing impact of digital content and content distribution in the educational domain can offer promising opportunities for a new approach in cultural heritage education. However, for educational purposes content digitization needs to be meaningful and should take into account the context-of-use in which the content is consumed.  The platform enables teachers to create narratives from cultural heritage content and link these narratives to events in time and locations.

During the platform design different challenges were taken up. First of all digital objects in the cultural heritage domain are often not created especially for educational usage. Teachers make other use of this content than the cultural heritage preservation domain does. Our didactization module allows for describing digital objects with metadata so these become suitable learning objects. Secondly digital cultural heritage comes in a wide variation of forms and formats. Teachers might have the need to manipulate and recreate the content into operational packages. We developed the (re)creation tools which allow teachers to adapt and manipulate the content and even share the recreated content with other teachers. Finally digital cultural content can be distributed in many ways. The combination of a distribution in a classroom setting (digital boards) and in a mobile context (distribution in a cultural heritage setting by means of mobile devices) is a suitable example of meaningful learning. We developed tools which allow teachers and pupils to consume the content in different settings. Cultural heritage content that can be used in-situ and as well in the classroom has a high added-value compared to the individual digital objects that does not put the information in context.

The EPICS e-learning platform allows teachers to create, manipulate and share interactive, context-aware and multi-channel content assemblies. These can vary from simple presentations to deeply-elaborated interactive and context-aware stories. A story is a type of narrative or a sequence of events and interactions that conveys a specific message to the user. It consists of a set of scenes and scene transitions. By adding actors, stories can become highly narrative. The story creator can easily create new stories using existing content and use these stories in a mobile (in-situ) or classroom context. Flexible and graphically rich interfaces are supported. Context-aware mobile stories can be deployed on a mobile device and support a rich learning experience on cultural heritage sites.