Fri 20 Jan 2012
Training Team
Today three of our team left for Accra, Ghana and Nairobi, Kenya to train the technical coordinators who will be teaching the orientation sessions for our mobile phone pastor training course. These are most of the people who developed the training. It took a lot of work, but we expect it will pay off when we see the first wave of 2400 pastors-in-training start this course!
Tue 10 Jan 2012
Last minute software bugs are now fixed, so today we begin copying the first 600 memory chips that will go into each student phone. We will ship another 1800 blank memory chips, along with two mass duplicators, to the program coordinators in Ghana and Kenya. It is these memory chips which hold the content that each pastor-in-training will go through during their training. Without an Android smartphone, though, these memory chips are useless. Each one must be installed into a phone and activated before the training course will be available on the student-pastor’s phone.
For those interested in the geeky details; each memory chip is a 16 Gb Class 10 microSD flash memory card, similar to the ones that come in nearly every new Android smartphone these days.
Thu 5 Jan 2012
Today our team decided to send three people to do the training in Ghana and Kenya instead of two. This will increase the number of people on our team who can lead other mobile phone training projects in the future.
At the same time we are working on some minor last-minute bugs in the mobile phone training system. It seems that when you submit a quiz from one country to the “system” in another country the quiz answers get dropped. D’oh.
(I thought I’d start the new year by writing more about the smaller details that go into making a larger mobile phone pastor training course work.)
Tue 19 Jul 2011
Research has shown that 20% of the people in the U.S. willing to have a conversation about Jesus are less interested when they hear the name Campus Crusade for Christ. This, among other reasons prompted a name change. You can read more about it here. Don’t miss the menu at the top of the page with links to more information.
We like the new name.
Fri 24 Jun 2011
Pastor Philip
I don’t usually post our prayer letters here. At one point I’m sure I had a reason why, but now that they get posted to Twitter and Facebook, I don’t see why not here, too.
Sat 28 May 2011
Jerry Interviews a Mombasa Pastor
Actually none of the pastors we interviewed today were from Mombasa, but that was where we met them all. They took the final exam for the Institute of Christian Leadership course and told us about how their ministries changed as a result of the class and how they had grown spiritually through it.
Philip said he was so grateful for the class because he could not afford to pay for training at a seminary and couldn’t leave his ministry and family. He is a perfect example of why we developed this type of training.
Pastor Philip
And this is where we landed for the night; Mombasa Beach. No complaints. Back to Nairobi tomorrow.
Mombasa Beach
Thu 26 May 2011
A man walked into the NIST (Nairobi International School of Theology a.k.a. International Leadership University Kenya) office here in Nairobi today wanting to talk to the person organizing the mobile phone pastor training. He had read the article in today’s paper. Sure enough, there it was.
http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/-/539444/1169182/-/1232lbaz/-/index.html
Wed 18 May 2011
My favorite music is African, and hearing it sung live is the best. I recorded this at a church gathering of pastors in Mombasa using my video camera, so the audio quality is terrible and the men are only visible halfway through the video. But the music is pure enjoyment.
Tue 8 Mar 2011
Zarc Teaches a Group of Pastors
Class #2 of our mobile phone pastor training included a group from Mombasa, Kenya. While Mombasa is not exactly a remote location, having another cohort of pastors there allows us to learn how to run multiple classes in parallel.
Mombasa is like Orlando in the summer without air conditioning; warm and muggy. The culture was closer to Orlando, too; casual and relaxed. I didn’t have to wear my suit. The church in which we met had a dirt floor and a corrugated steel roof that was open to the sky in some parts. Fortunately there was an electrical outlet that kept our batteries charged long enough to register the new students.
Not only does the student learning application run on a mobile phone, but parts of the computerized learning system run on mobile phones as does the student administration program. Registering new students only requires access to the Internet on a smart phone.
Jerry with some of the pastors
As with the other groups that have started using this mobile phone training, this group learned how to use their new phones in a short time. Most of them had never used a touch screen device before, so they all had to learn new concepts. Eventually they all learned how to run the training application on their phones before we left.
Flying To Mombasa
We flew into Mombasa from Nairobi early in the morning, and we flew back to Nairobi in the afternoon. So I never got to see the coast of Kenya. What I saw of Mombasa looked the same as what I have seen of Nairobi. Maybe next trip to Kenya I’ll be able to spend some time in Mombasa on the coast, something every Kenyan tells me I should do.
Mon 7 Mar 2011
[We did this analysis a couple weeks after the launch of mLearning Class 2, but I dated this post earlier, so it wouldn't show at the top of the page.]
Wed 24 Nov 2010
The first mLearning class is complete, and it was a success!
33 students registered for the Institute of Christian Leadership class, and 32 of them completed the class on their mobile phones. All 32 returned to Nairobi for the final exam with a class average of A- on the same exam that the ‘reference’ group of in-class students took. We are excited and amazed.
Pastor Robert, from Rongai, returned with two of his lay church leaders and told us about the changes he experienced in his own life and the changes he observed in his two lay leaders. I smiled when he referred to the class material as ‘this gadget.’ Clearly it made a difference in his life.
Tue 23 Nov 2010
mLearning Students
Here are some of the things we heard when we interviewed these present and future church leaders after they completed the first mobile phone training class, the Institute of Christian Leadership.
I love Jesus more and have a deeper desire to share the love of Christ to others.
I have been personally helped to grow in the Word. I am adequately equipped to bring about changes in church.
I have grown in reflecting on the word of God, and knowing how to prepare and preach and study the Word.
Sun 21 Nov 2010
This trip to Kenya with Audrey has gone well.
Our friends, Michael and Rebecca, took us along to visit two of their recently formed farming co-ops as part of their community development work in rural Kenya. This was a fascinating adventure and gave us a view of the world we had never seen before. Yesterday we walked around Nairobi with my friends, Paul and Peter, and today we walked in Kibera for a while and had another amazing day.
Sun 21 Nov 2010
Some things in Kenya form an interesting contrast compared to life in America.
Audrey and I took a walk through the Kibera slum, today, with our friend, David. In order to dress as close to normal African garb as possible Audrey wore a skirt, and I wore my nicest pair of dress shoes. I almost never wear them back home, but they just looked normal here. With them I walked on the dirt roads in Kibera where the pot holes were filled with garbage and there is no sewage system. Same with Audrey. She never wears skirts in Orlando, but it was the most normal thing she could wear here. In order to look normal in one of the poorest parts of Kenya I had to wear my nicest pair of shoes and Audrey had to wear one of the nicest outfits she has ever worn in years.
My phone provided another irony. In this same slum is the highest concentration of mobile phone users in Kenya, as I understand it, and it seemed there were more ‘M-PESA’ shops than anywhere else in the city. M-PESA is the cell phone money transfer system that most Kenyans use to send money between people and between small businesses. The M-PESA shops are where you make cash deposits and withdrawals from your account, like a bank. For 2011 they estimate that 15% of the Kenyan GDP will flow through M-PESA.
My high-end Android smartphone, like the ones we gave tomorrow’s graduating mLearning Class students back in September at the start of the class, was not completely out of place in one of the largest slums in Africa. But since it has no “M-PESA” program on it, it couldn’t even perform one of the most basic functions that most Kenyans depend on for doing business.
Many Americans expect the rest of the world to follow the same development path America is on, but the reality of life today is that each place will find a development path of its own.
Tue 12 Oct 2010
Zarc Explains Something
To A Student Pastor
I got a new batch of pictures in today (posted on my Flickr.com photostream) of the mLearning Class. The students got Course #2 last week along with the rest of the training content we intended to deliver on-site in September. I am excited to see how things are going, and I am eager to do the work to improve future classes.
Tue 21 Sep 2010
My Friends in Rongai
When I arrived in Kenya a couple weeks ago for the launch of our first mobile phone-based pastor training class, I spent a day with my colleague driving out to a distant village to see if our mLearning phones would work like we expected.
We drove up the Rift Valley, about 100 miles away from Nairobi, and found a small village called Rongai. We wanted to find a local pastor, show him a working model of our mLearning phone, and see if our idea made sense to him.
Along the way I had one of the most enjoyable travel experiences ever. We were walking down a road behind the main part of this town when I heard a little girl say, “Hello Sir, how are you?”
“I’m fine. And how are you?” I replied.
“Fine, thank you,” was her answer.
“May I take your picture?” was my next question.
I took her picture then showed it to her on the camera’s display. She pointed to it and laughed with a sweet, innocent little girl laugh. Then she called her sister over and asked me to take another. Then both of them laughed and pointed and called their other sisters over.
“Take another! Take another!” was all they said after that.
Then the silly poses and hysterical laughter started. I have never had so much fun with total strangers!
Hamming It Up in Rongai
After leaving these girls we finally found the local pastor. We showed him a working model of our mLearning phone and explained the idea to him. He quickly understood the concept, and it made sense to him.
Not only did it make sense to him, he asked how he could sign up for the class! He leads 12 congregations, and he has a lot of elders to train. Some of his elders are oral learners, meaning they don’t read, and he thought these phones would work for them as well since all the training material is video and all the phone navigation is done using icons and a touch screen.
We returned a few days later and gave him three complimentary mLearning phones; one for him and two for him to circulate among the elders in his various congregations.
Rev. Robert from Rongai (center),
Dr. Ngaruiya, my colleague, and me
Rongai has a warm place in my heart now.
Here are a few more photos from my trip.
Mon 6 Sep 2010
Studying on an mLearning phone
Our first mLearning class started today. It was a bit different than we anticipated, but it started.
The biggest challenge to overcome was the failure of the memory cards we brought with us that contained all the training material. All 50 memory cards were incapable of playing video after just a couple times, so we had to use the smaller memory cards that came with the phones. There were other challenges, too, but we found similar alternate solutions for them as well.
The students are all excited to begin studying this new course. None of the students owned a touch screen phone, so everyone was learning something new. A few felt instantly comfortable and were navigating phone applications like a pro right away, a few followed along with our training and picked things up quickly, and a few needed some additional help.
I think we have a winning solution, and I look forward to seeing how students respond after a couple months of studying this way. The final exam will be in November.
Wed 28 Jul 2010
Here’s a brief outline of how our mobile seminary courses will work. We have been calling it our ‘mLearning Project.’
1. Student reads, watches, and listens to a series of educational materials on their phone. (A smartphone like this.)
2. At the end of each piece of educational material (like a video) there is a short quiz that the student completes on their phone. This quiz can either assess the student’s learning or simply indicate the student’s progress through the material and their confidence in understanding it. The learning software running on their smartphone bundles their quiz response into a text message and sends it to the data server at the seminary. Quiz example: “On a scale of 1 to 5, how confident are you that you have understood the material in this section?” or “Which of the following answers is correct?”
3. The instructor is notified when new text messages arrive at the seminary data server, indicating student progress through the material and areas where the student may need extra guidance.
4. At any time the student can initiate a discussion with other students or with an instructor to ask questions or discuss a topic using their phone, either by text message or voice call.
5. At the end of the study period, students return to the seminary for an exam that assesses their overall learning of the course material.
6. Future classes can be downloaded at an Internet cafe or transferred from another student phone. Students can make tuition payments using the money transfer service that comes with their mobile phone service.
Download a more detailed mLearning Project Summary
Thu 17 Jun 2010
CCC Internet Diagram
After three days of meeting and praying together with a handful of Campus Crusade’s Internet ministry leaders from around the world, we had made less progress than we had hoped for. We had wanted to write a description of what we are all working toward and map a clear path toward getting there, but making progress was slower than we expected. But right at the end of our time Simon, one of our leaders in Singapore, captured our progress with a simple diagram that illustrated the different aspects of how we are using the Internet to advance the gospel.
The diagram quickly circulated up the CCC leadership chain, and soon we had the opportunity to discuss the results of our meeting with the president of CCC, Steve Douglass. We asked him to consider designating an executive leader to help bring energy and clarity to all our various Internet initiatives.
All of this is just internal discussion within Campus Crusade, but the potential impact is great if we can get all our good ideas aligned with each other and working together well!
Wed 16 Jun 2010
Let’s start with the good news. The Church of Jesus Christ is growing rapidly in many places of the world.
As a result, new pastors need theological education so they can lead their churches and stay on course with sound doctrine.
Internet and mobile phone technology now creates the means to distribute this critical training to the pastors who need it at the time they need it most.
But here’s the problem. Most new pastors and many new churches don’t want training that has not been certified by a regionally recognized accreditation board. In North America, The Association of Theological Schools (ATS) is the recognized authority for accreditation of theological schools. Not many churches will hire a pastor who did not graduate from an ATS accredited school.
Accreditation boards have not yet caught up to where Internet and mobile phone technology has brought us. They are still regional, and they focus on certifying particular institutions. Educational institutions are the INPUTS of education. They are not the desired outcomes.
As a result of how the current accreditation system works, each educational institution develops their own curriculum and courses. Most of the time they produce all their own class material as well. Then they pay highly educated professors to distribute that training in a very expensive environment. Air conditioning, buildings, libraries, heat, dorms, etc. all cost a lot of money. Tuition rarely covers the entire expense of a student’s education. Foundations, governments, or other sources of income help most schools offset this loss.
What if we created an outcome-based accreditation system that focused on an individual’s educational OUTCOMES? If we did this, we wouldn’t have to focus on certifying particular institutions. Instead we would focus on whether a student possesses the academic outcomes required for a certain field of knowledge. This would allow each student to acquire the education they need without all the high cost of acquiring it in the traditional way (at a school).
Back to pastors. If each seminary continues producing all their own educational material and distributing it to students in the expensive environment of school campuses, we will never be able to train all the new pastors who are ready right now to lead new churches.
If we can switch to an individually focused outcome-based accreditation system, then we can use the leverage of Internet and mobile phone technology to distribute educational training at a rate and at a price that can keep up with Church growth.
With a new accreditation system we can see a more rapid spread of the gospel!
This is one of the major shifts we hope to accomplish with our mLearning Project. Yes, it’s ambitious.
Thu 25 Mar 2010
Keith Seabourn recently articulated some profound thoughts about the transition going on in education today.
Our development partner in the academic world makes a very strong point, in a presentation of his, about a transition from academic labor to educational capital. His point is that under the older academic labor system, the cost of preparing a course was very low, but the cost of training thousands with that course was very high, based on a professor’s salary to teach students 25-50 at a time.
The newer model of educational capital reverses this. The cost of preparing a course is high, but the cost of using the course to train thousands is very low.
At a recent conference, Dr. Richard Pratt shared that Third Millennium Ministries is finding this to be true. The cost of producing their courses is expensive on a per-minute basis for final course material. That means a 30 minute module will be very expensive to produce, but it is very cheap to distribute on the Internet.
Our mLearning Project in East Africa has many parts. One addresses the question “how good is good enough” for a distance learning course. We hope to learn what level of course material quality is necessary to see lives transformed.
Wed 24 Mar 2010
Watch this description of what my group in Campus Crusade for Christ in Orlando does.
Thu 25 Feb 2010
Internet access during my trip to Kenya last week did not allow me upload videos about the trip as it happened. Now that I am home, I thought I’d share this story about how God brought things together during my time there.
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