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. Rather than assess the student’s learning, the quiz indicates the student’s progress through the material and indicates his/her confidence in their understanding of the material. 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?”

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

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!

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.

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.

“The last 15 years have changed our world forever,” claims Tony Whittaker, coordinator of Internet Evangelism Day. “Digital media are transforming the way we communicate, behave and even think. If Facebook was a country, it would have the fourth largest population in the world.”

Internet Evangelism Day is a strategic resource to help the worldwide church understand these issues and use the Web to share the good news. It is both a year-round online guide and an annual focus day – to be held this year on Sunday 25 April.

Churches are encouraged to use Internet Evangelism Day resources to create a presentation for their members on or near that Sunday (or at any other time they choose). The IE Day site offers free downloads: PowerPoint, video clips, handouts, drama scripts, music and posters. These enable any church (or homegroup, college, or conference) to build a customized program, lasting from five minutes to fifty.

2010’s focus day will be the sixth to be used by churches around the world since the initiative’s launch in 2005. Over this period, digital media have developed dramatically, with the advent of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and the growing use of mobile phones to access online services. The outreach opportunities have multiplied too.

IE Day’s website is also a one-stop resource covering many subjects, including how to build a church website that is ‘outsider friendly’, using Twitter in evangelism, and blogging. Perhaps surprisingly, you do not need to be technical to share your faith online. And you can volunteer to be an email mentor to inquirers with several large online outreach ministries.

Internet Evangelism Day is an initiative of the Internet Evangelism Coalition, based at the Billy Graham Center, Wheaton. It is supported by a wide range of leaders and groups. “I am glad to commend Internet Evangelism Day,” says John Stott.

For more help, visit the website:
InternetEvangelismDay.com

“How can you know what Jesus really said?”

These are the type of questions people ask when they are searching for God, and the Internet is often where they go to find the answers. Campus Crusade for Christ publishes many websites that answer questions like these, but visitors still want to talk with someone personally about their questions.

This is where you can help. By simply sharing your own spiritual experience with visitors to some of these sites, you can help someone find a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. You can do this by becoming an online mentor and answering email messages that visitors submit from our various websites.

This is where you can find out more and begin the application process.

Spiritually searching people are waiting for you!

T-Mobile MyTouch phone

Google recently release a cool new phone based on its Android phone operating system. This operating system is what our mobile phone project is using, so I borrowed an Android-based phone to get up to speed with it. I’m hoping I can keep this phone long enough to take it with my on the project’s planning trip to Nairobi next month. It has been a long time since my work required me to learn a new gadget, so this has been fun.