Asian Art and Architecture is an open educational resources (OER) website created collaboratively by the students of Connecticut College in New London. Officially launched on December 21, 2021, it currently contains more than 300 posts authored by 59 students, including labels and descriptions of 272 individual images, 52 themed exhibitions, and 32 literature reviews. These cover a wide range of topics and geography, from ancient ceramics and bronzes in India, traditional Buddhist statuary in Pakistan, Nepal, and Tibet, to Chinese landscape paintings, 19th to 20th-century Japanese woodblock prints, and contemporary architecture, urban design, gardens, glassware, photography, and art installations in and beyond Asia. Highlighting the collections of Asian art and artifacts at Conn and the adjacent Lyman Allyn Art Museum, this site engages the students in the process of knowledge production and nurtures creativity, originality, and cultural and social conscience.
The purpose of this site is to provide free, academic-quality learning materials of Asian art and architecture to college students, educators, and any interested individuals. The majority of the visual materials are hand-picked, curated, and written about by Conn students during their study of the two courses taught by Prof. Di Luo: AHI/EAS 104 Introduction to Asian Art, and AHI/ARC 205/EAS 204 Japanese Art and Architecture.
The student authors of this site have highlighted the examples from the Conn College art collections. Moving forward, we aim to strengthen our collaborations with the College Libraries, the Digital Scholarship and Curriculum Center, and art museums in New London to enrich the visual materials made available by this project to the wider community free of charge.
This project received a State of Connecticut OER Impact Grant in 2021 in support of the development, maintenance, and dissemination of the site. It is listed on GoOpenCT.
Copyright
All student-created contents on the site are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
Adoption of the OER
Users of the OER site might wish to utilize the exhibitions to design their own courses. Potentially, each exhibition can be adapted as a 75-minute lecture on Asian art and architecture, with assigned readings listed in the bibliography at the end of the exhibition catalog.
Alternatively, instructors might find it helpful to select from the images and incorporate them into their lesson plans. The image database is conceived exactly for this purpose to allow maximum flexibility in organizing and re-organizing visual examples to suit individual course needs and pedagogical objectives.
Faculty choosing to adopt this OER should also keep in mind that adopting the contents alone would fall short of intellectual stimulation and critical skill development. To maximize the positive outcomes of using this OER, specific core course activities, especially close-looking exercises (with field trips in the most ideal situation) and student research projects (such as mini-exhibitions) should be incorporated in parallel to the written materials into the course.
Student authors
Support staff
Lyndsay Bratton, Assistant Director for Digital Scholarship
Benjamin Panciera, Director of Special Collections and Archives
Andrew Lopez, Research Support Librarian and Government Documents Coordinator
Tertia Trowbridge, Senior Associate Director, Corporate, Foundation & Government Relations
Michael Dreimiller, Digital Media Specialist
Lori Looney, Research, Data, and Collection Support Librarian
Acknowledgements
Connecticut College Department of Art History and Architectural Studies
Connecticut College Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives
Connecticut College Digital Scholarship and Curriculum Center (DSCC)
State of Connecticut Open Educational Resource Coordinating Council
Little Frog Gallery
Prof. Yibing Huang, East Asian Languages & Cultures, Connecticut College
Prof. Hisae Kobayashi, East Asian Languages & Cultures, Connecticut College
Dr. Gerald Kozicz, Graz University of Technology, Austria
Dr. Ming Xue, American Museum of Natural History
Prof. Rika Hiro, Scripps College
Prof. Petya Andreeva, Parson New School of Design
Prof. Andrew Quintman, Religion & East Asian Studies, Wesleyan University
Mr. Paul Ruther, Manager of Docent Programs, National Museum of Asian Art
Mr. Charles Silver, Docent, National Museum of Asian Art
Ms. Bharati Dhruva, Docent, National Museum of Asian Art
Timeline
Phase 2: Spring 2022
- Creation of ArcGIS maps and Storymaps
- Development and revision of existing contents
- Extension of the use of the site to AHI/EAS 208 Silk Road
Phase 1: 2021
December 21, 2021. Launch of the site
April 2021. CT OER Impact Grant awarded
January–May 2021. Pilot run of the site
Contact
For questions and comments regarding the site, please email Di Luo (dluo1@conncoll.edu).
