Born of the COVID-19 pandemic, Barnes Foundation is now sharing its online education tech

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Barnes Foundation was forced to move all its art classes online, the available online meeting platforms were not that great.

Video conferencing applications like Zoom and Microsoft Teams allowed teachers to show paintings from the Barnes collection, but the resolution was not crisp enough, and students were locked into only seeing what that instructor put on the screen. Students could not explore the impressionist brushstrokes on the surface of canvases at their own pace.

So, the Barnes developed its own technology, the Visual Experience Platform, or VXP.

“We needed students to be able to interact with visual media on their own to help facilitate the type of learning that we believe is best suited to students for art,” said Chief Operating Officer William Cary.

“It’s the same type [of learning] that Dr. Barnes believed in, which is experiential, interactive, dialogical,” he said. “We needed a platform that allowed you to zoom in very close, that allowed you to compare different types of works.”

Now, the Barnes has started offering VXP to other institutions through licensing agreements. The first taker is the Penn Museum, which will use the platform for its Deep Dig classes and Archeology in Action lecture series so students can closely examine ancient artifacts.

“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,” said Jennifer Brehm, Penn Museum’s director of learning and community engagement.

The VXP is basically a split screen with the instructor live streaming in one window while the other is a dynamic view of the object being discussed — a painting, artifact, manuscript, etc. — which the student can navigate in real time. The technology also works with classes where the instructor’s presentation is pre-recorded, but students can still closely interact with the material however they choose.

“If you think about watching a YouTube video, that’s a very passive experience,” Cary said. “In the VXP, even with our pre-recorded, asynchronous material, you can be in that explore mode while watching the recordings. You can zoom around, check out other things.”

The technology is aligned with the Barnes Foundation’s educational philosophy that was established over a century ago by its founder Dr. Albert Barnes and philosopher John Dewey, with whom Barnes had a close association.

“Dewey argued that the most meaningful learning happens when students participate actively in the process,” said Martha Lucy, the Barnes’ deputy director for research, interpretation, and education. “He and Dr. Albert Barnes both believed that a work of art is something to be experienced and discovered by the individual learner — not something that you just passively receive information about.”

Licensing its technology to other institutions is part of the Barnes Foundation’s recent push to expand its operations and services beyond the legacy of its founder and his renowned art collection.

Recently, the Barnes became the administrative operation partner of the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. In September, when the Calder Gardens opens to the public on the Parkway, the Barnes will manage daily operations of the cultural center based on the work of Alexander Calder.

“The Barnes sees itself as an innovator and incubator for ideas that can serve us, and can also serve the field,” Cary said. “We think this expansion of business models allow us to further our educational mission while also making ourselves and other institutions more financially sustainable.”

Cary added that VXP is not meant to replace or compete with the in-person gallery experience, which remains paramount. But like the Barnes Foundation’s stated reasons for leaving Lower Merion 13 years ago — to expand the scope of the organization then under financial distress — going online allows it to expand further.

“We think the online offerings that we’ve been able to create through this technology allow us to expand the reach of the institution in ways that, frankly, exceed the scale of what we can accommodate in our building on Ben Franklin Parkway,” he said.