Edward and Betty Marcus Digital Education Project

In the first Marcus Fellows grant to the North Texas Institute for Educators on the Visual Arts 14 years ago, the Fellows accepted a technological challenge. In collaboration with the Dallas Museum of Art, they developed an interactive CD-ROM to teach fifth graders about art. In more recent years, nearly every proposal to the foundation has included elements of technology. Today, through Marcus Foundation grants, Texas museums routinely send curriculum-based art lessons electronically directly into classrooms, collaborate with teachers across the state to develop lesson plans, and deliver those plans via the Internet to teachers whose schools are often too far from a museum for field trips. In 2006, that tradition continued with the launch of a major new programmatic endeavor, called the Edward and Betty Marcus Digital Education Project for Texas Museums. The singular focus of the effort has been to stimulate visual arts education in Texas by increasing the capacity of Texas museums to use digital storytelling tools and techniques.

The New Media Consortium has managed the project over the past 3 years. Texas museum professionals have received scholarships for custom-designed hands-on training support for certain software and equipment installation including servers, access to help desk and support resources, and subsidized participation in a national community of like-minded professionals working in universities and museums. In addition, the project has hosted two major conferences on digital media in arts education and subsidized the registration fees for participating Texas museum professionals.

Between September 2007 and April 2009, the foundation awarded a series of mini-grants to participants in the Digital Education Project to create visual arts education projects using digital media. The major goal of the project has been to stimulate the creation of a body of materials that can be shared among Texas institutions to support arts education in museums, schools, and university programs. As such, a requirement of the grant program was that materials produced with Foundation grant dollars or other support be licensed for use by any not-for profit educational institution, museum, or visual art education organization in the state of Texas. The Marcus Collection, a rich library of material on a wide variety of art-related topics, is now available for any educational use.

It is the hope of both the Marcus Foundation and the NMC that the design for this project will be seen as a model for other states. To that end, the NMC released Into the Breach: How Creative Philanthropy Can Reverse the Eroding Landscape of Arts Education, a publication describing the effort. Participants have also been encouraged to present papers at national conferences and meetings, and have done so over the course of the project.

First and foremost, however, the primary beneficiaries are the Texas museum community -- museum professionals, visitors, teachers and children -- who through this project can share and enjoy the rich collections of Texas art museums more effectively and easily than ever before.