I am finding out just how much people are hungry for great resources, especially free mp3s. Praise God for Reformed Theological Seminary and Covenant Theological Seminary for putting some excellent mp3s for free as resources on their website. I think the Kingdom of Christ will be expanded greatly by their generosity, especially for those in parts of Asia, South America, and Africa where people have a hard enough time to eat food, let alone to spend thousands of dollars on room, board, and tuition at a seminary.
And then there are biblicaltraining.org and thirdmill.org who are trying to build a curriculum for free for those around the world. I had a crazy idea and was wondering what people thought. Think about how much is spent on overhead at a seminary. There are the building costs, administrational staff, infrastructure, etc. All of this counts heavily in the tuition of students. What if professors actually were professors to the world through a virtual class? They’d sit in their own living room on webcam and interact with everyone in the world. And then the gazillions of people now graduating from places with Ph.D.’s with no place to go, are paid to be TAs and grade papers. It would be live chat room based with Q and A directly with the prof. This could be recorded and posted. A fee is charged for those who can afford it and the prof would be paid for it. Also, online mp3s that are already out there can be utilized in a core curriculum. I know this is crazy but given the open source world of software, what about open source seminary? At the very least, this would be extremely helpful to third world pastors.
Just some thoughts…
Sam, as usual, great thoughts.
One source of potential opposition: traditional brick-and-mortar school/seminaries. This may be seen in part in the resistance of these institutions to online learning for $$$. Anecdote – a few years ago I asked a rep of Westminster Theological Seminary what plans the school had to use online education to meet the needs of those who wanted further training but were not located near a WTS campus. The reps response was one of great arrogance and condescension as he sneered at me and assured me that it would never happen. So …
Posted by TimK | June 8, 2007, 1:20 pmSadly Tim, it doesn’t surprise me that you got that response. But some of the B&M seminaries like RTS and Covenant are getting it. There’s a parallel in the secular world concerning music downloading. The RIAA before iTunes refused to have a vision for a digital age and so they resisted online music. Of course, that led to some serious downloading illegally. The fought and resisted, but once they gave in, they saw that they were making more from iTunes and other mp3 sharing sites than ever before.
I think B&M seminaries will always be there. But what distinguishes seminaries from the RIAA should be the Gospel’s advance, shouldn’t it? There are pastors around the world learning some trashy theology because they could never come to the US to learn. And then some people are going oversees to teach some trashy theology. Amazingly, online you can learn from the likes of Sproul, Piper, Carson, Wells, Grudem, etc. and all for free. I hope the B&M seminaries see the future.
Posted by admin | June 8, 2007, 3:09 pm