WELS: [Welstech] Online Bible Study

Tue Jan 15 07:06:02 CST 2008

Hi Pastor Wagner,

I work for the University of Wisconsin-Platteville in Distance Education (WELS member at Grace PdC, WI). Here are a few alternatives that I have tested for online resources that could be used at Grace:

For a discussion group, I have found that Bravenet.com offers some very good services. While they offer free services, I would recommend paying the additional (I think $6.00 per service) monthly fee to avoid the addition of advertising on your pages. I had set up a discussion board for our Sunday School teachers using this service (see http://grace2020.bravejournal.com/index.php). If you would be interested in viewing the comments and setup of the discussion, please contact my pastor, Pastor Matthew Holtz. (I will let him make that decision. We kept it a private discussion board with the hopes of more particiation.) We also tried using email as a communciation tool for discussion. This was not entirely successful--it is hard to keep a thread going using email but it is certainly an option. I think it would work better with smaller groups.

If you have someone with some web development background, then I would recommend the following: 
Bravenet also offers web hosting services for $12.00/mo. which include MySQL and PHP. The MySQL is unlimited, so there are many services that can be set up, using open source applications. They also give you 1GB of space. Some of the Open Source Apps that I have tried include the following:
PHPbb: This is a bulletin board that can be setup for online discussions. It is similar to the Bravenet service, but you have some more options available when setting it up...and if you want to add more services, it is cheaper ($12.00 total if you add your own vs. $6.00 for each service). An example of this can be seen at http://grace-women.bravehost.com/discuss/. It was set up as an option for our ladies to use to discuss book in their book club. Currently it is not being used as the course has finished.
If you are interested in setting up a blog, I recommend Word Press. It can be setup so that people can respond (such as to a controversial topic) or just to share with others. A pastor or layperson could set one up for daily prayers, meditations, or reflections.
If someone is really ambitious, I recommend trying Moodle. It is a somewhat difficult to install, but after the installation the work really begins. It is an Open Source Course Management system--which means an entire course could be used to teach an online course. It includes discussion boards, quizes, surveys, calendars, assignment schedules, and more. I started to set one up at http://grace-women.bravehost.com/moodle/ but didn't get very far. If you would like to log in as a guest, login as username wels and password online.
If you Google these applications they have online demos that you can go into to see more--i.e. the administrative setup. I only give the links to allow you to see one setup (and to know that it is possible with the resources I have listed.) 

I hope this is helpful. As for online participation...well, most people prefer face-to-face. It is difficult to motivate people to go to a web page to study. (Online degrees are sought usually as a last resort--because of constraints in scheduling and location.) However, I believe it is doable. It also takes quite a bit of work to maintain something like Moodle. There are tutorials out there to help learn the process. If you do something like that, I would encourage pastors and teachers to share the content material for the courses with others and have your technology person (or "course developer") do some documentation. I was hoping to develop an online "course" about Dr. Martin Luther, but my motherboard fried and I have been spending time and resources in getting it back up and running (finally there!) Maybe now I can put some time into that effort. I'm thinking that maybe a younger generation would be more open to the idea of electronic delivery.

I hope this helps. (BTW, for anyone interested in project management tools, I have found that dotProject is very useful for me at work in managing my tasks/projects.)

Sue

----- Original Message ----
From: Timothy Wagner <wagnertr at hotmail.com>
To: welstech at messenger.wels.net; wels-winkel at yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, January 14, 2008 3:01:53 PM
Subject: WELS: [Welstech] Online Bible Study

Greetings!

Our congregation, like most (all?) congregations, struggles to get people to attend midweek Bible studies. One factor is that our people are geographically spread over a pretty large distance, and, combined with the travel times of suburban Chicago, many simply cannot commit to traveling 45 minutes or more to drive one way to church for an hour Bible study. And yet, in general, our people have welcomed the concept of more Bible study opportunities.

So, I am trying to introduce Bible studies in some different formats. In addition to our regular Sunday bible study, I would like to begin an online Bible study. For this study, I would likely distribute lessons and questions via e-mail or our website and then invite the participants to discuss their answers online in some way.
I'd also like to begin a "Book Club" style Bible Study. I'd like to begin with Paustian's "Prepared to Answer" books. In the future, this might include WELS books like the People's Bible Teachings books or "mainstream" books like Rick Warren or Max Lucado stuff. For the book study, I'd like to offer options for face-to-face discussions (either at church or in member homes) or online discussions.

My goal is to try to involve as many people as possible by offering as many different formats and settings as possible. 

I guess all my rambling comes down to these few questions:
--Do any of you have experience with using an online Bible study format? What tips or suggestions do you have for this? (We use Finalweb for our website)
--What experience to you have with a "Book Club" format? What tips or suggestions do you have for this? How often should the group meet (weekly, bi-weekly, just at the end of the book...)? How structured should the discussions be (discussion guides for leaders? study
guides for members?)?
--Do you have or know of any resources for a discussion/bible study based on Paustian's books?

Thank you for taking time to share your thoughts and suggestions.

In Him,

Pastor Tim Wagner
Abiding Peace Lutheran Church, Elgin, IL

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