Intensive Courses—Requirements and DesignPosted on January 23, 2014 by Ryan TormaA number of seminaries, such as Luther Seminary and Bethel Seminary, are developing intensive courses, which bring students on-campus for face-to-face learning for one to two weeks at a time. Instead of 3 hours per week for fifteen weeks, an intensive course might meet up-to 8 hours per day over the course of 5 days.Designing and teaching courses in this format presents a number of significant challenges….
Resisting Disembodiment – Distributed Learning is Not Distance EducationPosted on December 27, 2013 by Ryan TormaWhen I first started working in online seminary education, my boss explained to me, ‘We don’t do distance education, we do distributed learning.’ Working with her and many other wise leaders, I came to understand what they meant. Distance education implies a learned center from which education radiates out. Online learning technologies allow education to be delivered to people who are distant from that center, but they are distant nonetheless.Distributed learning is something different….