Progress in Online Course Development
By Tom Castor | August 17, 2020 | News
For several months now, we have been writing material for an online course based on our book, Travel Guide to the Bible. Our friends in West Africa have been asking for this for more than a year now. While this will be of great benefit to our friends there, we have had to adjust our priorities to create the time needed to tackle such a mammoth task.
We, along with a volunteer, are crafting 20-25 questions for each chapter of the book. That may seem like a modest task, but considering that the book has seventy chapters, we will need to have written more than 1,500 questions to finish the job. These will primarily be reading comprehension questions. With Bible text reading requirements in each chapter, a reader will be tested on significant sections of Bible content. Once we finish the questions, we will send the material to multiple readers for field-testing. After we have received those results, we will make the appropriate content adjustments and edits, and the course will be ready for the designer.
The course will first be offered on our A Simple Word site in English. After we guide the first participants through the online course process, we will make any additional adjustments necessary and then translate the entire course into French. Once that translation is complete, we will make the course available through our site targeting Francophone West Africa, Vérité Simples.
As with most of our projects, when we discuss what we are doing with missionaries in other parts of the world, they realize that such a course could be beneficial in their ministries. As a result of one of those contacts, we are exploring the possibility of making the course available in Arabic.
Pray for our friends and us as we work to create questions that will help our readers gain a deeper understanding of God’s word.