Open Educational Resources are great tools to enrich education of millions and millions of people. I have always welcomed technology in my classroom and enthusiastically embraced it. I encourage
collaborative inquiry in my classes. I also do emphasize that learning is a social or communal
activity. I am an enthusiast and an explorer of technological tools of pedagogy and research as a
scholar of humanities. Yet, technology should not be abused or replace a wholesome encounter
among learners with a glance at the monitor. It is my mission to examine a validity of software
or hardware devices in consideration of fundamental and ancillary learning outcomes in each
course. In the 21st Century, I want my students to read classics in humanities and to augment
their technology literacy of digital humanities. When they are willing to learn, they should not
be discouraged by expensive textbooks or research materials. Learning should come out of
equity and inclusion. OER provide an essential way of increasing accessibility to learning.
For some courses I have developed, we don’t have standard textbooks. Open educational
resources (OER) were essential for my new courses, Asian American Art and Design and History
of East Asian Costume. With some support from the library and from the visual resources in my
department, I was able to develop an image database and several assignments involving the
Wikipedia educational component. Students in my class and virtual exchange students at
Tianjin Normal University wrote entries of Asian historical clothing for Wikipedia. It was not
easy to begin without much inner knowledge of the Wikipedia community. With help from Professor
Helen Lane, Instructional Design Librarian and others, we were able to learn how to contribute
to the Wikipedia community. Materials made by my class in the first year were then used by those
enrolled in the next year. Students expanded the repository of readings and wiki entries in
subsequent semesters.
I have taught an online version of East Asian Art and Civilization in the regular semesters for five
years and developed new online courses such as Korean Art and Civilization and Japanese Art
and Civilization. These courses are offered in summer and winter semesters to enable students
to broaden their cultural competencies and to enhance scheduling flexibility. I also developed a
blended version of Art in New York, which is a popular field-trip based course. With a blended
environment, I can bring exciting scenes of art museums and galleries of New York City into an
online forum enhanced with diverse presentation tools including, not limited to, the Blackboard
Ultra Video Conferencing, Padlet, the Adobe Spark, Voice Thread, Zoom, and the
Cisco WebEx. With these digital tools, my students and I developed a digital humanities project
teaching various techniques of Asian arts and crafts. Thus, we created the Bamboo Canvas:
Diverse Techniques of Asian Arts and Crafts, a digital humanities project as OER in order to
embolden free access to rare resources. The project itself was funded by the SUNY IITG
(Innovative Instructional Technology Grant) twice in 2016-2017 and then 2017-2018 (with
Elaine Maldonado, professor and director of Center for Excellence in Teaching at FIT). The SUNY
Faculty Advisory Council on Teaching and Technology (FACT2) recognized this effort of
incorporating new and existing technology in ways that enhance the curriculum and engage
students using methods and strategies that are scalable and transportable to other settings.
This OER is available to all: my students taking Asian art surveys, both online and face to face,
students of the virtual exchange in other countries, and diverse communities of educators,
artists, and art enthusiasts. Overall, I am satisfied with creating a community of contributors
and patrons. My virtual exchange courses enhanced by OER increased constructive
communication and interaction whether they come from a same campus or whether learning
takes place between individuals or groups who are geographically separated and/or from
different cultural backgrounds.
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