Distance Learning Week 5 Assignment

With my course project choice being to help the people in the mentorship program I proposed for Christian Youth, I thought it best to look at online Bible classes. Using a basic Google search I found numerous classes to take, but decided to focus on free ones that ended in ".org" instead of the others. It was a way to limit and I have always considered a little more trustworthy.

The Online Bible course I chose was Jordan Park which is a course offered by Jordan Park Church of Christ in Huntsville, Alabama (I have never been there and have no affiliation with the church.)

Before I start my critique of the course, I would like to say "Thank you" to the church for offering a service that is helpful to many people.

It was obvious that this was not an elaborate, highly-backed project. It was simple text, simple script, and simple tools, which for a basic learner can be very important. However, I am not a basic learner, and I am definitely not one who likes to just read text, especially online. There were no graphics, no images, no animation, just text. It was appreciated that the text was different depending on the importance, but it was still just text. I could tell that they were hoping to reach an audience through the Internet, but looking at our course text "Teaching and Learning at a Distance," I get the sense of "'Dumping' a Face-to-Face Course onto the Web." I could easily see this information as a sermon or a pamphlet or a Bible Tract.

The one redeeming factor of the course was the end quizzes. It gave you fill-in-the-blank, true/false, and multiple choice (with more than one possible answer). Now I am not a fan of quizzes, but the thing that helped was the fill-in-the-blank was not from text on the site. You had to find references in the Bible and fill-in-the-blank from the verses in the Bible.

I will admit that this is not the best online course, but it has potential.

References
Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2009). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (4th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.