In October 2001, MAF-D.E. team members, Richard Morris and Ron Banks, provided an introductory training workshop for twelve participants. They included the Academic Dean and selected faculty with selected senior students from Armenia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Seminar topics included an introduction to DE, course analysis and design, and practice with a real course idea. In four days the three teams produced an initial design for courses in apologetics, evangelism, and church history.

At the end of an early morning presentation for top Seminary leadership, Richard asked the question, "How might DE be used to further your school's ministry?" After a period of untranslated conversation, the President responded by saying, "Our school already has many more students taking part-time and extension programs than residential programs. DE is a natural extension for us. DE will support our teaching in Armenia and Central Asia, as well as in several places in the Ukraine."

Ten Russian church leaders in Kaluga, Russia studied the pilot distance education course "The Mystery of Marriage." These ten men minister throughout the Kaluga Oblast, an area the size of Maryland, with a population of over one million. In many ways, they were a diverse group-six of the men are married, three are single, and one was recently widowed. They included church elders, pastors, church-planters, a youth pastor, and the bishop who is responsible for all the Baptist churches in the Oblast. Three of the men have theological training. Two have their own computers, and the others traveled to the computer learning center where they accessed the marriage course, e-mail, the Internet, and online biblical tools through the networked computers and servers installed by MAF-U.S. The men ranged in age from 24 to 40.

For eight weeks this fall, the students worked through the interactive lessons on the theological foundations of Christian marriage and nurtured an e-mail discussion on the implications for their personal spiritual lives, marriages, and ministries. At the same time, course facilitators followed and guided their discussions from Moscow, California, and North Carolina via e-mail. Distance is not longer an obstacle to learning. It was exciting to see the group bond together, and to grow in their understanding of how biblical truth can, and should, change the way we live.

Some of the students took a few weeks to get used to the new teaching format. For some, even typing was a new activity. By the middle of the course, however, everyone was on board and thoroughly enjoying the interaction and felt the learning experience was greatly enhanced by color graphics, photos, audio files, hot-linked Russian Bible text, and other resources.

Our focus was on life-change, not on a cool, new medium. We wanted to know if that happens through distance education. The answer was a resounding, "Yes!"

Profile of a Typical Student

Leonid

Leonid is a 24-year-old, single engineer. He trusted Christ in 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union. Since then, he as been active in church ministry. Today, he is working as an evangelist and church planter among the youth in Kaluga, Russia. He also directs the youth and singles ministry throughout the Kaluga Oblast -- an area larger than Maryland.

At first glance, Leonid seemed a poor fit for the distance education course on marriage. That perception quickly changed. As an intelligent, highly educated young Russian, Leonid represents a key audience that has not been penetrated with the Gospel, but who are drawn to computers and technology. Leonid, who has his own computer and Internet access, soon became the computer consultant for the nine other students who studied the course with him.

Leonid is in a strategic position to teach the biblical foundations of marriage to thousands of Russian singles and youth. Through his input, we hope to see a new generation of Christian marriages that are founded on solid principles, and that will avoid some of the problems that plague so many existing marriages in Russia. The distance education has helped Leonid to grasp the important issues, and prepared him for a more effective ministry. Here's how he describes the difference the course made in his life:

Until this moment, I thought that the family was a private issue, but the Word of God convinced me that it is the opposite -- the family is the foundational relationship in the Church, affecting the success of ministry, and as the basic cell of the Church, everything depends on it.

I have begun to realize what kind of relationship I should have with Christ as his "Bride," and that this imposes corresponding demands on my service to Him.

During this course, I have seen that there is a direct correlation between being a Christian husband and a pastor. It even seems to me that in the work of a pastor, everything begins with the family and that those relationships are directly reflected in his ministry.

I really liked the fact that this course was built on the example of a concrete family (Ivan and Katya). The couple's discussions were very interesting to me and this helped me understand to whom the various themes of the lesson were directed.

This was a principally new and original method of study that I never before had opportunity to employ. The method was very helpful and interesting to me.

I would like for there to be other similar courses on other topics. May God bless you in this!

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.

Greater openness to the gospel in the Arabic speaking world will result in more believers and churches. It is critical that emerging church leaders in the region have more access to Bible study tools and Christian books for training. In many countries where the need for Arabic Christian materials is already great, it is difficult to get books into the country. Bible resources on CDROMs enable easier distribution and greater protection for believers in sensitive areas.

Jordan Evangelical Theological Seminary (J.E.T.S.) and Mission Aviation Fellowship (M.A.F.) have formed a joint project to produce these much-needed materials on CDROM. We will use the experience and software development from the MAF managed Russian Bibliologia Christian Library project to produce a similar product for Arabic speakers. These CDROMs will provide an effective way to distribute needed Christian training materials in a media that is easily duplicated and transported to the places they are needed.

JETS and MAF will work together to produce non-commercial CDs that will contain Bibles, Bible reference study aids, training courses and Christian books to fill a crucial need in the region. JETS will work mainly in the area of text permissions, digital preparation and formatting and MAF will work in preparing the software needed for search, display and printing of the materials. MAF will also provide technical training for text digital preparation and formatting.

Project Goals

This project will follow the example of the Russian Bibliologia project described in the History section. The goal of the project is to provide Bible study tools including various Bible translations in Arabic, French, English, Hebrew and Greek on a easily transportable and usable CDROM format. A special Bible software program called Inter-Bible will allow searching, selecting, wordprocessing and printing of this information as needed.

The project will also provide support Bible resources including dictionaries, commentaries, cross references, and lexicons to enable indepth study of the Holy Scriptures. Christian books, references, study materials and courses will be in digital format on the CDROMs for direct usage on computer when they are available. The digital file formats used for storage will also lend themselves to easy printing so that those without access to computers can still benefit from the resources and courses when they are printed at the location where they are needed. Books are in short supply and having these materials in digital format will be a vital resource on many fronts.

In the seminaries and Bible schools they can be put on the computer learning center networks and used as course resource materials. This usually would not be possible if the schools had to depend on printed resources. Students who cannot afford to own a copy of course resources can now bring them back home with them on CDROM. These resources will also be available for use by other leaders when the students return to their place of ministry.

MAF's experience and software development from leading a similar project for the development of Russian resources will allow this Arabic project to be done more efficiently. Many of the software tools and also the methods and standards have already been developed. There will still be a sizable effort required to accommodate the Arabic script and right to left pagination.