Subject: Setting up your own "Social Ministry of the Church" courses or other courses

Dear Christian friend,

Thank you for your interest in teaching our online interactive courses. Our "Social Ministry of the Church" courses are now available to receive in English and Russian.

To set up your courses on your LAN or website, you should modify any contact info with the information necessary for your organization and your website.

As course administrator, click on "How to make 'login' files." There you will learn how to build the encrypted "login.js" file for each course (in ../plugins/[coursename]) that contain the login IDs, passwords and email addresses you will add for the students, instructors and registrar.

If you have more than 4-5 students in a new course, decide if it is necessary to divide the course into two or more discussion groups: see "How to make 'login' files" for details. Leading multiple discussion groups together with teaching a course is more work, therefore avoid it if the number of your students is not very large.

You can easily set up an address such as "john-instructor@my-website.com" for each instructor, but how do you send students' discussion question answers to all the students in a course? There are two methods:

1) Use the "Forwarding" option at your website: forward all the emails addressed to "class01-group01@my-website.com" to a listserv such as at Google Groups for all your students. Why do this? The "sendmail" program on most web servers requires that all messages sent from it come from an email address that uses your website name, to eliminate the possibility of outsiders using your website to send out spam. For example, if your website is "www.my-website.net", your "sendmail" program can send email only from addresses ending with "@my-website.net".

So you can create an email address for your discussion group such as "[discuss-group]@my-website.com", and in your website's email system forward all messages having that email address to the Google Group or other "listserv" that you have set up. Then instruct your students to reply to that group's email address, not to an individual student: this way the discussions keep going.

Next, change the "POST" line in discussion.js and lesson-header.js to *your* hosting service's sendmail program, for example (view source code):

2) The second method is to use the "FormMail.pl" Perl script in the cgi-bin folder in our Agape-Biblia-combo-inst module. You must modify the @referrers and @recipients variables as described in the file FormMail-Readme.txt for your server (and for your listserv if you use a different listserv than googlegroups.com). Then upload this cgi-bin folder to the cgi-bin folder on your website, and change the permissions on FormMail.pl to 744 so that you as owner can update the file, but visitors can only read and execute the file. (Your FTP program should have the option to change file permissions on your website.)

Next, change the "POST" line in discussion.js and lesson-header.js to your website, its cgi-bin folder and your "FormMail.pl" file, such as (view source code):

Here is what the directory structure must look like on a LAN or a website, for the "Social Ministry of the Church" courses to work correctly:

(root*)/audio
(root*)/cgi-bin
(root*)/img
(root*)/include
(root*)/plugins/pract-ministries
(root*)/plugins/[your courses that you develop]
(root*)/upravlen

*The name "root" can be whatever you want on your LAN or website for the HTML versions of our English courses. The starting file for Social Ministry of the Church is "index04.htm" which must be in the "root" directory. Likewise, any other courses you develop should have their "index??.htm" file in the "root" directory.

Your fellow-servant,

Dr. Robert Hosken
General Editor of Agape-Biblia and webmaster
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Free online Bibles and courses at www.agape-biblia.org