New Central Asian Learning Center Installation

History of this Learning Center

Over two years ago at our first distance education training in Central Asia we had members from Campus Crusade for Christ attend who were working in a remote city in a neighboring country. They expressed strong interest in implementing distance education in their city. They had developed a computer center as a small business for the believers from the local Church and were hoping to use the resource to benefit the believers as a whole in their city. The Director of the CCC efforts desired to see this tool used for training of Christian leaders. It took just over two years from that first seminar that they attended before we were ready to go to their city and install a learning center. The computer center there consisted of 10 computers and they had us purchase a server for them in preparation for the installation.

Computer Setup of Learning Center

Bakha and Tim traveled to their city first in June for a survey trip and then in the middle of August for the installation. Bakha oversaw the installation of the server. The setup went well. The technical setup went very well during the first two days despite the fact that we had to modify slightly our standard setup in order to make it work within their existing computer network.

Tutor Training

On Thursday, Tim led an all day workshop for Tutor training. About 8 potential tutors attended. The seminar had been advertised to local Churches and they had been asked to send one or two leaders to the training. All of the tutors were young, but each held different positions of leadership within their churches including one that was an assistant pastor.

The training was divided into two major parts. The first part was principles of adult education and learning how their role as tutors of DE courses for adults differs from the traditional classroom setting many had grown up in. It helped them understand that they are not as much a teacher as they are a guide to help the students discover and learn on their own. The second part of the seminar focused more specifically on the DE learning environment and how to maintain an effective ‘cyber classroom’ environment. During this part we used the new learning center setup to simulate discussion within a classroom where questions were posed by the instructor and responded to by the student. During this simulation Tim also simulated lack of attention by the instructor as well as effects of over involvement and criticism by the instructor.

We also evaluated a number of case studies and discussed how the tutor could recognize existing problems in those case studies and improve the situation to make it more effective for the students. The goal was to help the tutors understand that they need to be flexible and adapt to the students and at times modify the discussion questions and course procedures in order to create a better learning experience for the students.

Overall the training was very successful. Evaluations at the end of the seminar were very positive. Most felt the information was well-balanced and clear. The next step is for each of the people who went through the seminar to participate in a DE class together to build experience with the DE environment. One of the students was chosen to act as the Tutor for this first class, but all understood that he was learning the process just like the rest of them.