Lastest Wabash Center Article on #LearningOnline in Theological Education

You can read the article online or download a PDF version here

Well, I have not been doing much posting on the blog (just way way toooooo busy) but I have been slowly working on publishing steadily again, starting with the Wabash Center's series on Online Teaching-Learning, then working on some lectionary articles with the Westminster  John Knox Press Series Connections (Lectionary B), and eventually going full steam to finish a long overdue monograph with Mohr-Siebeck. 
   For now, I hope those interested in online education will find this article helpful on "5 Tips for Effective Online Teacher-Student Communication" born from trial and error, mostly error, and learning to be a better teacher in the process. 

G(r)eeking out over Online Tech Tools

My YouTube channel where I post all my instructional videos

It's been a whirl-wind couple of weeks culminating at SBL-AAR 2018, enjoying Thanksgiving, and getting back to work on grading and teaching. I wish I had more time to reflect on the SBL conference and the sessions that I heard but I think I'm just going to have to plunge into the end of the Fall semester since the final exams are coming around the corner in a few weeks. 

    That said, it was nice to see my 2nd blog post published at the Wabash Center for Teaching Theology and Religion as part of their ongoing series in online education. In the 2nd blog article, I write on the tech tools necessary for the would-be course designer and instructor to teach biblical languages online, focusing on the current course I'm teaching at North Park. The technology is available and affordable to teach beginning Greek (and Hebrew) well and effectively for today's online learning community. If you're curious, check out my blog article entitled: "G(r)eeking out over Online Tech Tools" here.

    Blessings as we head into Advent in one week's time. MJL

New Blog Series on Teaching Greek Online

This past summer, I received a teaching grant from the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning Theology and Religion to design and implement an online course for 1st year Biblical Greek. Over the span of 3 months, I created 80+ instructional videos, posted them on YouTube, designed a course shell on the Canvas learning management system, acquired skills in new technologies and applied new pedagogies. But the best part was a series of workshops held at the Wabash Center where I talked a cohort of other theological educators on the strategies, successes and failures, best teaching techniques, most effective learning activities, and everything one could think of concerning how to teach any part of the theological curriculum in a fully asynchronous, blended, hybrid or flipped course.
     I was not sure whether I could pull of teaching Greek 1 and 2 in a fully online medium but it's happening. The course design I created this summer is something I'm using right now this academic year of 2018-19. The Wabash Center kindly asked me to do a series of blog posts (5-6 in total) where I describe my experience teaching Greek online throughout the next two semesters. The 1st of the blog posts on the Wabash website has been published. 
    Click here to hear how I changed my mind about online teaching, and what face-to-face learning experiences can and cannot be approximated online and how some online teaching practices actually serve our communities more effectively than on-campus ones.