Global Discipleship and Online Learning: What does Blackboard Have to do with Jerusalem?
Shirley Roels, Director of the Lilly Vocational Project at Calvin College
Christian Scholar's Review
Volume XXXIII, Number 4 (Summer 2004)

Summary
If the mission of Christian higher education is to disciple the Christians of this world and their cultures, then e-learning provides our best avenue to create global access to deeper Christian learning.

Key Points

• For Christian colleges and universities, the question is whether our current paradigm for Christian education has been overly restricted by physical geography in an age where our sense of place can be broader.

• Globally, growing populations groups have potential interest in an education that is Christian.

• The real question is not whether e-learning can replicate the on-campus course experience. The defining issue is whether e-learning has the capacity to offer coursework that creates a sound and needed program of study.

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Headings

• Introduction
• Developing Our Mission
  
• A Century of Opportunity and Challenge
  
• E-Learning and the Mission: Worries
  
• E-Learning and the Mission: Possibilities
  
• Conclusion

Key Statements

• "Like the late 1990s technology stock bubble, some of the promise of e-learning was more a figment of overactive social hubris than of well-considered educational philosophy and careful analysis. In hindsight it seems that some of these early e-gardeners mixed their means and ends."

• "If as a community of Christian educators we value the lifelong pursuit of Christian education, e-learning may provide one important avenue for adult access to such knowledge and values."

• "Globally, growing populations groups have potential interest in an education that is Christian."

• "If Christian educators are serious about disciple-making for all nations, then we need a model of access to and delivery of Christian higher education that can match the emerging demand and fill global gaps."

• "Christian higher education has gradually recovered a vision of education that intertwines knowledge, character, skill and virtue. Does online learning once again divorce the informational head and technique hand from the passionate heart of education?"

• "The real question is not whether e-learning can replicate the on-campus course experience. The defining issue is whether e-learning has the capacity to offer coursework that creates a sound and needed program of study."

• "We should not automatically elevate what occurs on our campus when comparing it with online learning; and we should not presume that embodied holistic education cannot occur in other frameworks."

• "Thankfully, e-learning is not our God. We are not dependent on technology to give us meaning and hope. Yet given this, we can more readily place online learning within the way of the cross. It could assist our common cultural discipleship as together we learn to die to our old lives and rise to the new ones we have in Christ."

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