The LikeBerea Consortium Christian Seminaries, Mission Organizations, and Churches Cooperating to use Collaborative and Distance Education Software

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1 The LikeBerea Consortium Christian Seminaries, Mission Organizations, and Churches Cooperating to use Collaborative and Distance Education Software LikeBerea is a new concept for providing important technology services to Christian organizations. Our focus is on Christian seminaries, mission organizations, and churches. LikeBerea is supported by Sakai, software that securely provides services for learning and community building. For seminaries, the software provides support for distance education and provides the infrastructure for professional learning communities of faculty, administrators and students. Seminaries can now offer courses to students regardless of physical location. For mission organizations, the software supports communities of practice. The purposes of these communities can vary widely, from mission planning for a specific geographic region, to a widely dispersed community that supports a particular missionary or mission, to a group of mothers who are sharing resources for homeschooling their children while on the mission field, to administrative groups that support missionaries. For churches, the software supports a variety of purposes from discipleship training for members to creating communities around particular projects. The system is based on Sakai, an open source learning management system (LMS). Developed initially by MIT, Stanford, University of Michigan and Indiana University, Sakai is now used all over the world to support distance education. LikeBerea uses the same educational components, but goes further and uses Sakai to support a variety of communities, whether their purposes are academic or broader. Tools within Sakai such as threaded discussions, live video conferencing, assignments, tests, gradebooks, learner analytics, and much more combine to make the system a superior choice for a variety of Christian organization purposes. LikeBerea is not a software vendor. It is a membership consortium. The members collaboratively use the software to support their work, spreading the costs around in order to make the system even more affordable. Members pay an annual fee for belonging to the consortium as well as a fee based on the number of active users they are supporting. Members are all Christian organizations, ascribing to basic Christian orthodoxy, but having a variety of denominational perspectives. Currently we have members from the Methodist, Presbyterian (PCA), Episcopalian and Reformed traditions. We have users on five continents. The LikeBerea Consortium is freed from managing the complexity of learning management software and the technical details of the host servers. The Longsight Group organization securely hosts the consortium s software, provides all servers and keeps them updated and tuned, and provides support to the members. Optional training for members is also available. By belonging to the consortium, members are able to rapidly deploy the system to their users (students, missionaries, congregational leaders, and so on) with almost no technical expertise. LikeBerea has been live since The consortium is based on a model begun in 2006, the LAMP consortium for small colleges in the Appalachian Mountains. Similar to the LAMP model, LikeBerea is financially self-sustaining through its membership fees, provides all needed services to support and host the system, and is a vibrant community of practitioners who are committed to each others' mutual success. (In 2008, this LAMP model won the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Award for Technology Collaboration, underscoring the creativity and viability of this model.) LikeBerea continues to accept membership applications from organizations. We invite further discussion as you consider whether the LikeBerea consortium is a good fit for your organization. Request more information at

2 A Proposal: LikeBerea Supports Emerging Practices in Education and Leadership Development This proposal presumes that technology supports teaching and learning in face-to-face, online and blended instruction. LikeBerea practices challenge the tendency to use technology primarily as a tool for the transmission of content and simple interaction with and among adult learners. Clearly, 21 st century technology assists the distribution of information; but more promising is its capacity to support engagement with subject matter, to foster human dialogue and relationship, to encourage personal and spiritual formation, and to assist in research and the creation of alternate strategies. The LikeBerea Consortium The consortium outlined in this proposal will create economic efficiency for its members but not as an end in itself. At present, LikeBerea includes four theological schools (three North American, one in Peru), a church, and a mission organization. A denominational member is a provisional member at present using Sakai to support orientation training. Schools in Hungary and Costa Rica are eager to join as funds become available. Other organizations have expressed interest and are reviewing the documents. See Attachment: LikeBerea Members to Date. See also for additional information. Many international schools are particularly vulnerable and would benefit from a supportive consortium. Western funding is less available, missionaries are leaving or changing roles (where once they were "free" faculty), infrastructure put in place when western funding was more available for education and development projects, is less and less sustainable, conventional curriculum is perceived to be inadequate or incongruent with the needs of their own context, and in some instances war, unrest, or other social factors are threatening survival. The "employment" of national leadership is a good thing, but is threatened in that many leaders have had no training in education or educational leadership and in many instances were not "groomed" for this sort of leadership. National faculty are often part time or less because they have to work at jobs that will pay. Student composition is changing adult learners are less able to be residential and when other factors are present, a residential model is difficult to support. A further complication is that international schools believe they have to enter into multiple (and expensive) accreditation processes and those processes often require them to maintain what they feel they have to change. Accreditation is often necessary for cultural (upward) mobility, but any trend toward compliance or maintaining a view of education that is simply a replication of a western university model will hinder innovation. And, in time, the familiar western style curriculum will become impossible to sustain. Projected Outcomes We envision the larger task as learning and leader development accomplished through one or a combination of modes (face-to-face, online, hybrid, formal, and/or nonformal). Also, the task of leadership development is necessarily broadened beyond the professional to the development of lay leaders. Thus, currently, consortium members include theological schools, congregations, mission organizations and could expand to include members from other sectors (e.g., NGOs, community development agencies, nonformal initiatives). 1. Participants in the consortium will have deepened their understanding of the nature of learning; will increase their expertise and their repertoire of approaches in teaching and Page 2

3 learning; and will improve their ability to apply technology to online learning and in web enhanced face-to-face formats. 2. Instructional leaders and adult learners will assist one another in developing intercultural and collaborative learning experiences using 21 st century tools. Research will be encouraged among international leaders to inquire into the nature of learning in indigenous contexts. 3. Adult learners will experience greater variety and richness in their learning because of improved designs for learning. 4. Consortium members, working together in professional learning communities, will develop a culture of innovation in their respective organizations in order to sustain professional development and instructional improvement. 5. Participating organizational members will achieve greater hardware and software sophistication, including new cost saving practices and expertise in selecting, using, and supporting interactive technologies in support of learning. 6. Participants will serve as coaches for others in their respective organizations; and a body of resources developed through the project will become available to other agencies worldwide. 7. Members of the consortium will contribute to a deeper understanding of organizational evaluation and assessment for learning, using findings to support continuous improvement. Teaching and learning benefit from a 21 st century technological infrastructure for both online and web enhanced face-to-face instruction, for personalized development in instruction, and to assist institutional innovation. The growth edge for LikeBerea members is to distinguish among institutional structures and teaching and learning processes that currently advance learning and understanding; those processes that could be improved; and those approaches that should be abandoned. Benefits to Members of the LikeBerea Consortium The anticipated primary benefits to the members of the LikeBerea Consortium are economic efficiency, shared resources and expertise, support for collaborative research and development, and support for innovation. Economic Efficiency and Technological Support LikeBerea receives technological support and annual training in Sakai through its professional hosting company: the CEATH Company. 1 Hosting personnel assist faculty with issues such as the incorporation of multiple media tools, criteria for selection of a new media, assisting learners with new technologies, managing a course with collaborative technologies, and so on. Conventional 20 th century technological infrastructure for teaching and learning was unnecessarily expensive because servers were on the premises (and typically they were far less secure and reliable than those provided by a current hosting company); a full or part time suite of information technology (IT) personnel to manage hardware and software systems; database managers for each segment of the system (e.g., student information, financial information, records); and each school having to fund a learning management system. 1 See Page 3

4 LikeBerea uses a shared instance of Sakai an open-source, integrated, interactive learning management platform that includes hosted technology support with an open-source service company. 2 The papers Open Source vs Commercial, Sakai vs Moodle, and Cloud vs On-Site Hosting, are among downloads at the LikeBerea website that provide helpful information for selecting a learning management system. 3 (Note that no institutional data is accessible by other members, and with the security redundancies built into Sakai, data is more secure than it would be using an on-site server.) Cost effective cellular technology and smartphone usage is increasing exponentially worldwide. Sakai works well on mobile devices. Martin Ramsay, Managing Director of CEATH Company, notes that it is useful to think of Sakai in three layers: the browser-based layer that the user experiences, the rendering layer that extracts data from Sakai's databases and renders it for the browser to display, and the database layer where the actual course content resides. The rendering layer is smart enough to detect what kind of device the user has (including a smart phone) and can thus configure the way data is displayed to be appropriate to the device. Having one's portal to the learning management system in one's pocket is different in both substantial and subtle ways that affect how we should think about pedagogy. But I think it is early: I don't think we really understand all the implications yet. Shared Resources and Expertise LikeBerea members access, and will occasionally create, resources to increase awareness of developments in instructional design, to develop desired skills and capacities, to improve organizational evaluation and assessment for learning, and so on. Members engage professional development opportunities at reduced cost through LikeBerea. Similarly, the consortium is able to negotiate reduced fees for third party applications (such as streaming video, 4 plagiarism software from Turnitin, 5 and live video conferencing from Big Blue Button. 6 Support for Collaborative Research and Development Members with shared interests in working across disciplines and/or organizations, may collaborate on various projects and research proposals (e.g., members of nonformal and formal education, and community development agencies explore suitable approaches to lifelong learning; faculty from different schools globally create a blended course that merges online resources in biblical archaeology and geography with biblical studies; academic scholars and congregational leaders together address an ethical issue in the community). 2 Go to for the current list of academic partners. Sakai is a collaborative, opensource software that provides a secure and flexible platform for teaching, learning, and collaboration for a variety of projects in either fully or partially online learning environments. It supports about twenty languages. The advantages of Sakai over other open source systems include (1) the monetary stability of the Sakai Foundation and their disciplined process for continued advancement and development of new features within the product, (2) the high level of interoperability which easily allows for integration with third party applications, and (3) Sakai is secure and reliable at an enterprise level which allows Sakai to be scaled to many thousands of users without any negative implications in the system Longsight makes this available at a reduced fee, and it integrates well with Sakai. The CEATH Company also provides information and suggestions about other ways of managing video that may work better in some instances. 5 Turnitin is available to the consortium at a much better price than each organization (expecially schools) could negotiate separately, and it integrates seamlessly into Sakai. 6 Big Blue Button is an open source (free) product and integrates seamlessly into Sakai. Other commercial products (notably Wimba and Elluminate) are very expensive and have now been subsumed into Blackboard so that they are no longer available without also purchasing Blackboard. Page 4

5 Support for Innovation Innovation in higher education, especially, is a critical need. This proposal views leadership for the whole people of God as the larger framework within which theological schools have a part. Increasingly, schools are realizing the importance of partnering with other organizations. Initiatives created and tested by members of LikeBerea may contribute to innovation in a broader ecology of theological education. The LikeBerea Consortium, because of shared expertise, the willingness of members to explore alternatives, a flexible technological support platform, and cost efficiency is positioned to develop and support innovation among member organizations. Financials Though the yearly cost to join is minimal compared with other technologically supported ventures, organizations with limited resources typically will require a start up subsidy. Additional costs include a stipend plus expenses for the facilitators of workshops for member training and development; and support for projects (often created by members) to advance alternatives in teaching and learning for the purpose of Christian leader development. Funding Projections Member Organizations will pay the following: Membership in the LikeBerea Consortium is $2,000 per year, and costs for users start at $2,500 per year for a minimum block of 250 active users. An active user is defined as one who has logged onto Sakai at least twice in a membership year - July 1 to June 30 with no penalty for just taking an initial look; and is enrolled in at least one learning experience or community (e.g., a course, a nonformal learning experience, workshop, etc.). Users who are not enrolled in some kind of planned learning experience don t count in the total. User fees increase in a 250 user increments each increment an additional $2,500 in costs. With 1,000 users a "volume discount" applies. (The fee per user is $10.00 or less which can be recouped by charging a user fee. This fee is substantially less than that charged by many learning management software companies.) Member Organizations will share the following costs: Facilitators of training charge $1,000 for a day-long workshop plus expenses. If the training is outside of the US, the rate becomes $2,000 plus expenses because of added time in travel and other logistics. Projects may be designed by participants from member organizations and costs shared among those organizations. Martin Ramsay Managing Director, CEATH Company martin@ceath.com Meri MacLeod President, Digital Seminarian Educational Specialist merim@digitalseminarian.com Tel. (616) Linda Cannell Academic Administrator and Professor, retired lmcannell@comcast.net Tel Page 5

6 ATTACHMENT LikeBerea Consortium Members to August Nashotah House/Nashotah House Theological Seminary Nashotah, Wisconsin Covenant Theological Seminary St. Louis, MO The Saints Augustine Seminary Anglican Diocese of Peru Lima, Peru 4. New Brunswick Theological Seminary New Brunswick, NJ 5. Corinth Reformed Church Byran Center, MI 6. The Mission Society Norcross, Georgia (with over 200 missionaries on five continents) 7. The Evangelical Covenant Church (involved for 3 years, provisional member) Chicago, IL (Denominational Offices) Page 6