#24 How Museums Can Thrive Online with Emily Kotecki

Show Notes

This episode's guest is Emily Kotecki, the principal and founder of High Beam Strategies.  With a wealth of experience in online learning, including crafting audio tours and developing apps for museums, Emily shares her expertise in creating compelling digital learning experiences. Drawing from her work with clients and her publication The Distance Learning Workbook, she emphasizes the importance of building a robust foundation for distance learning initiatives. Through a detailed discussion, Emily addresses the challenges and opportunities of engaging digital visitors, expanding museum audiences, and innovative revenue models through digital platforms. She underscores the significance of distance learning in extending the reach of museums beyond their local communities, fostering global connections, and democratizing access to cultural education.

The episode further explores the nuances of professional development in the digital age, pondering the design differences between asynchronous and synchronous sessions, and strategies to enhance teacher engagement with professional development. Emily's insights into creating live virtual field trips and her model for virtual field trip creation are particularly compelling, offering listeners a blueprint for inspiring and implementing digital learning projects. The conversation culminates in a playful yet enlightening round of Museum Buzzwords Alphabet, alongside a reflective question on the overarching importance of distance learning. This episode is a treasure trove of knowledge for educators, museum professionals, and anyone interested in the intersection of culture, education, and technology, providing actionable strategies and thought-provoking perspectives on the future of digital learning and museums.

Guest link:
High Beam Strategies: https://highbeamstrategies.com/.
Click through to download "The Distance Learning Workbook."

Host links:
Browse amazing virtual learning opportunities at Allyson & Tami's CILC.org

Seth's Banyan Global Learning provides teacher Professional Development in AI Literacy and special event live virtual learning for students.

 

Creators and Guests

Host

Allyson Mitchell

SF

Host

Seth Fleischauer

TM

Host

Tami Moehring

What is Why Distance Learning??

Why Distance Learning? is a podcast about the decisions, design choices, and assumptions that determine whether live virtual learning becomes shallow and transactional—or meaningful, relational, and effective at scale.

The show is designed for education leaders, instructional designers, and system-level practitioners responsible for adopting, scaling, and sustaining virtual, hybrid, and online learning models. Each episode examines the structural conditions under which distance learning actually works—and the predictable reasons it fails when it doesn’t.

Through conversations with researchers, experienced practitioners, and field-shaping leaders, Why Distance Learning? translates research, field evidence, and lived experience into decision-relevant insight. Episodes surface real tradeoffs, near-failures, and hard-won lessons, equipping listeners with clear framing and language they can use to explain, defend, or redesign distance learning models in real organizational contexts.

Hosted by Seth Fleischauer of Banyan Global Learning, and Allyson Mitchell and Tami Moehring of the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration, the podcast challenges outdated narratives about distance learning and explores what becomes possible when live virtual education is designed intentionally, human-centered, and grounded in evidence.