(to Russian version) Grace, mercy and peace from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord!
Our "Disciple All Nations" system shows you how to create and run your own online courses, like our short 8-lesson course "St. Athanasius: on the Incarnation and our six-course, 94-lesson "Social Ministry of the Church" (S.M.C.) one-year program. Click on the "slider" menu button in the upper-left corner to see all the choices. "Disciple All Nations" is a model "virtual" classroom for Distance Discipleship (DD): it shows you how to teach our courses or build the various modules needed to create your own: scroll down to read how do this!
People can study either by enrolling in our courses with a group of other students (which we recommend) from a church, seminary, Bible college, or on their computer at home. Or they can study alone as a self-directed student (which is harder to stay motivated and finish the courses): they can login as "guest" in the lessons, leaving their name and email address to receive replies. When students enroll, we will place them in a group of other students that can interact with each other by Skype real-time chat and video sessions or Google Groups email, and will have a course mentor who will guide the discussions, evaluate their essay responses in the quizzes, and most importantly check that they are applying what they learn in their life of discipleship.
Here are THREE WAYS to teach these courses to several students:
A) WE TEACH THE ENTIRE COURSE ONLINE: Students can login as "guest" over the WWW and then enroll to take our courses. Then the registrar will send each of them their unique user-IDs and passwords. They must use an email address fom Gmail and the Chrome browser. Thus, they will be able to participate in class discussions online with other students during the week while at home, at work, at school, at a library or an Internet-cafe, and send their quiz answers in each lesson to the instructor directly from our server. In this case I, the www.Agape-Restoration-Society.org webmaster, would also be the instructor and the discussion group leader. If some students from the same church enroll, I will happy to copy the priest/pastor or deacon on all class email correspondence.
B) YOU LEAD YOUR OWN DISCUSSION GROUP: Your instructor/discussion group leader must promptly reply to all of the emails received from students: this is the most crucial factor for success in Distance Discipleship! Checking for incoming messages at least twice a day and replying immediately is absolutely essential. Don't wait until the next morning to reply: do it the same day! The discussion group leader(s) don't need to be computer "gurus," they should just be person(s) who can teach up to 4-5 students, who are patient and good discussion leaders - "faithful men, who will be able to teach others also" (2 Tim. 2:2), who have basic email skills and keep records of the grades for lessons that students complete, for each written assignment or exam, and the final grades when students finish each course, using the "List of students.xlsx" spreadsheet* in our download module. Regularly back-up these course records (and other files) on a flash drive or online backup! [*If you don't have MicroSoft Office on your computer, you can download the free, MS-Office-compatible software from www.LibreOffice.org.]
We will set up a special "Discussion Group" - a Skype moderated chat groups or a Google Group for people in your church or school, and we will add its address and each of your student's addresses in our login file on our website so that emails are forwarded to your group. Be sure that your students who register online enter your name and email address correctly, so I know which group to put them in! Your discussion group leader can also teach face-to-face in a group setting using printed lessons or a projector, a large monitor or TV connected to a computer to display each lesson in your church or school. You can meet face-to-face once a week, assigning the lessons in advance for the following week: for those students who don't have access to a computer or aren't computer-savvy, use the "Print" button that you will find at the start of each lesson to print out the lessons, and have these students write their answers on those printed lessons. Face-to-face discipleship, when possible, is the most effective way! Or you can just communicate via email. If they use computers, all they need is a web-based email account, so it's good to know how to help your students create one. When each student has free time, he/she can use the "Guest" login on Windows 8 PCs, or on Windows 10 PCs you can create a "Visitor" local account for them, or perhaps you might set up a login on a computer for each student.
C) YOU RUN THE ENTIRE COURSE YOURSELF: We set up your class, you do the rest. In addition to an instructor/discussion group leader (see "B" above), you'll need someone (the same or another person) who knows how to set up Skype moderated chat groups or listservs such as Google Groups (https://groups.google.com). The correct format for adding new Google Groups members is "First name last name" <email address> (then a comma, if you're adding another member at the same time). You set up your own Skype or Google group, then write to webmaster@agape-biblia.org requesting him to set up links or forwarding to your instructor, class & discussion group email adddresses, telling him:
1. the name of your church's or school's website,
2. the email addresses that you will use for:
a. your instructor,
b. class listserv (usually on Google Groups), and
c. discussion group listserv (usually on Google Groups) if more than 4-5 of your students enroll.
Our webmaster will create addresses on our server that will forward messages to the addresses you give us. This is because our server, like most servers, only allows the "sendmail" program to send emails to addresses with our domain name ("agape-restoration-society.org") to prevent spammers from using our website. But the webmaster can login and create forwarding addresses.
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Our courses help to prepare volunteers to do diakonia-ministry to "the poor, the lame, the maimed and the blind, to widows and orphans," and perhaps build and operate your own self-financing "Agape Restoration Center."
ENROLLMENT FORMS are found by clicking on the three-bar menu button in the upper left, then choosing "Introduction" in each course: scroll down to enroll to receive your unique login and password and participate with other students. Our "Social Ministry of the Church" (S.M.C.) "Fall Semester" begins in September with our Introductory Course, and runs for 4 weeks, 3 lessons per week. The next 2 courses run for 5.5 weeks each, 3 lessons per week, up to Christmas. In mid-January our "Spring Semester" begins with the last 3 courses that run for 6 weeks each, 3 lessons per week, up to the end of May or early June.
Any donation for our setting up the courses, mentoring and grading exams should be very moderate, something that is affordable for most people in your culture, and yet an amount that shows the student is willing to make a commitment to take the course and finish it. In the West we'd appreciate a donation of about $20 per course. In Russia the seminary where I teach asks for the equivalent of about $10 per course. These donations are used to help run the website and institution: "The laborer is worthy of his hire." You can donate to our ministry HERE.
I revise the schedule for the next course 2-3 weeks before each new session, so that visitors to our website can see in advance when the new course will begin and how long it lasts. Remind your students to access and print out their course schedule.
If you download and install our app on your website, your students can use the "LOGIN" link on the page "Welcome to Our Courses" in this app to register, then your students will link to the lessons and World English Bible on our www.Agape-Restoration-Society.org/index04.htm website, so your computer person doesn't need to install all those files. The reason we must do this is because modern web hosting servers do not allow "cross-site scripting" - sending information via Javascript from a PC to a website, or from one Internet domain to another domain.
To learn how to create your own courses on your LAN or website, click HERE and HERE. You can download for free the necessary files from HERE to create your own courses. Our system is designed for a person who has basic copy-and-paste skills, and knows just a little HTML and Javascript. Our system can easily support 10-15 students. This is ideal for a church, small seminary or school that doesn't have a full-time IT specialist. Distance Education systems like Moodle or Blackboard are much more complicated, and require a person with a degree in IT to install, maintain and customize it, using programming languages like PHP on a server.