The Japanese Women Directors Project: Open Education Resources for Teaching and Public Access

Project Title	The Japanese Women Directors Project: Open Education Resources for Teaching and Public Access
Principal Investigator	Colleen Laird
Faculty	Arts
Funding Year	2022
Project Summary	The project will result in the production of three interrelated series of Open Education Resource (OER) videos designed for use in secondary education Japanese cinema and film studies courses. Support from the Open Education Resource Fund will not only assist with the development of these videos, but will support a trial integration of the materials into four courses at UBC (three undergraduate classes and one graduate seminar). In total, the project will result in the development of twenty videos, divided into three series. The series are designed to complement each other such that they can be used together to create classroom/syllabi modules. Moreover, the three series will be hosted on an independent website entitled “The Japanese Women Directors Project” and curated in a way that highlights interactive connections between site content and other websites. The three series are: (1) Five 45-minute “Digital Dialogues” with scholars who have published on or are working on Japanese women directors. Each interview will focus on a piece of scholarship (either published or in development) and will take the shape of an informal conversation between me and the guest. The final video will incorporate film clips and still images (fair use) to illustrate the conversation. As OER, the videos will also include introductory voice-overs that help frame the conversation for students as well as “educational wrappers” (e.g. summaries, key terms, discussion questions, and guides for further study). (2) Ten five-minute “Director Profile” videos that focus on a single filmmaker, her biography, her works, a filmography timeline that includes contextual information about developments in Japanese media industries, and the director’s public statements about the experience of filmmaking. Five of the videos will feature the directors discussed in the interview series. The other five are designed to encourage colleagues to develop future pieces that can connect back to the profile videos. (3) Five five-minute “Video Essays” that visually explore the ideas discussed in the interviews with scholars. These videos will serve as templates to promote future submissions. The Video Essays series aims to be an ongoing cultivation of student-produced videographic work generated from my own courses and from the classrooms of active collaborators. In addition to the videos, I will work with two PhD students to revise current syllabi that I use in courses here at UBC to integrate the content of the “Japanese Women Directors Project” website. The target courses are: ASIA 354 “Introduction to Japanese Cinema” (80 students, taught annually in both Winter Term 1 and Term 2), ASIA 465 “Japanese Horror” (55 students, taught one term every other year), ASIA 462 “Genre and Japanese Cinema” (55 students, taught one term every other year), and ASIA 535 “Japanese Cinema Studies” (15 students, taught one term every other year). The revised syllabi will also be hosted on the website as open-access materials that can be used by other instructors of Japanese cinema (teaching in English) anywhere around the world.
Grant type	OER Implementation
Funded Amount	$24,160