Bible Colleges in the 21 st Century

Transcription

1 Bible Colleges in the 21 st Century Just a few weeks after terrorists hijacked planes and used them to attack the Pentagon and World Trade Center, I was asked to become the president of Piedmont International University in Winston Salem, NC. I had no way of knowing the extent of how the tragic events of September 11, 2001 would transform our world, nor could I have imagined the changes that would sweep across the higher education landscape. Like many other Bible college leaders, I had to quickly learn to navigate a variety of shifting currents in the post 9/11 economy and deal with the continuous emergence of disruptive innovations and new technologies. In addition, I felt the urgent need to address the two horrible trends that have been plaguing American higher education for years. First, over the past several decades the overall cost of attending college has been skyrocketing out of control unlike anything else in the economy. According to a Bloomberg Report, college tuition and fees have increased more than 1,120% since That is roughly twice as fast as the increases in medical care and four times faster than increases in the consumer price index. 1 Student loan debt totals over $1 trillion and now exceeds total credit card debt and total auto loans in the U.S. 2 The average college graduate this year owes over $32,000 in college- related debt. Second, to make matters even worse, college outcomes seem to be falling as fast as tuition rates are rising, with the majority of recent graduates facing bleak prospects for good jobs related to their degrees. No wonder Forbes recently reported that about one- third of millennials say they would have been better off working, instead of going to college and paying tuition. 3 The combination of unrealistic cost, suffocating debt and diminishing outcomes has led to numerous calls for comprehensive reform with many experts offering dire predictions about higher education being the next bubble expected to burst. The trends are simply unsustainable. One silver lining that these problems are driving is new innovation with real potential to simultaneously cut tuition, reduce student debt and improve learning and outcomes. A number of universities are beginning to look beyond static traditional classrooms and dated online models toward far more creative and affordable approaches. A good example is the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), which has taken the world of higher education by storm. Offered free to students around the world, MOOC s typically utilize interactive web tools in sharp contrast with the taped lecture approach that has been a hallmark of traditional online education /cost- of- college- degree- in- u- s- 2 owe trillion- student- loans- article loan- problems- one- third- of- millennials- regret- going- to- college/.

2 The first open online course that was truly massive was taught by a celebrated Stanford University professor named Sebastian Thrun. In 2011 he offered his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course free to anyone on earth. Over 160,000 people enrolled from some 190 countries. Dr. Thrun stated that in one course he had taught more AI students than all the rest of the AI professors in the world combined. Students listened to the same lectures and participated in the same experiences as Stanford students who were typically paying over $50,000 per year. The top 400 highest grades in the class were from non- Stanford students. In 2012 Dr. Thrun co- founded Udacity to offer free MOOC s to the world. The following year Harvard and MIT each invested $30 million to create edx and offered their first MOOC, Circuits and Electronics, from MIT. That one course drew over 150,000 students from some 160 countries. Within a year edx had enrolled a million students and now partners with scores of elite universities from around the globe. Next came Coursera. Offering a variety of courses and partnering with key universities, Coursera now has over 9.2 million users in 750 courses from over 100 institutions. Subjects cover everything from history to poetry, computer science and health- care policy. Another growing trend is collaboration. American colleges have always developed partnerships, but the Internet has removed geographic barriers. Dozens of consortia have been developed, and colleges are coming together to cut costs, reduce duplication, enhance research and improve quality. Consolidation, cooperation and consortium are the new normal. Technology is also driving a variety of exciting new approaches for improved learning. For example, Piedmont has embraced the flipped classroom. This approach inverts traditional teaching methods by delivering instructional online video lectures outside of class and moving interactive homework into the classroom. Unfortunately, traditional online education used the Internet to deliver content but failed to utilize technology to improve pedagogy. Schools simply took their old classroom lectures and assignments and pushed them out through the wires. While this provided greater flexibility for students and new sources of revenue for schools, it failed to address teaching and learning. Various versions of the flipped classroom are improving both. First, there is the improved lecture that is on video and available for students to watch online wherever and whenever they prefer. Professors know that their videos will be out there on the Internet for the entire world to see, so they work very hard to make sure they are outstanding. Students enjoy working through the material at their own pace and can replay the videos as often as needed. Second, the big win takes place when the students return to the classroom after watching the video lecture to learn through joint activities, direct mentoring and a variety of creative and interactive projects. Teachers do more mentoring than ever before, and now they can help individual students overcome obstacles to learning.

3 Clintondale High School in Metro Detroit was an early adapter of the flipped classroom and has garnered national attention because of its amazing turnaround after flipping every course in the entire school. 4 Most of the innovations sweeping higher education are products of the Internet that is quickly transforming virtually everything and making our entire world more: Global The world of work is increasingly international. As more and more companies move to the global marketplace, it is common for work teams to span continents and be culturally diverse. Working from his home country of St. Vincent, a West Indian pastor/graphic artist designed the current Piedmont logo. That seemed most appropriate to me as we added International to our school name and featured the curvature of the earth in the logo. Mobile There are now more than 6 billion active cell phone accounts, and 1.2 billion have mobile broadband as well. Eighty- five percent of new devices can access the mobile web. People expect to work, learn, socialize, and play whenever and wherever they want to. Increasingly, people own more than one device, using a computer, smartphone and tablet, and they now expect a seamless experience across all their devices. Wearables like Google Glass and the highly anticipated and recently announced Apple Watch may be the next wave, along with simple, quick, electronic payment options. Social Around a billion people log into Facebook on mobile devices every month, and some 350 million photos are now uploaded there every day. Visual Technologies are increasingly cloud- based, and content is delivered over phone networks, facilitating the rapid growth of online videos. Almost two hours of video footage is uploaded to YouTube every second. The future of higher education will undoubtedly feature video content delivered seamlessly to mobile devices. Digital The book is being reimagined. Libraries are in the palm of the hand. School, literacy, education, etc. are quickly being redefined. PIU students in remote corners of the earth can instantly access extensive online library databases directly through the Piedmont portal. This is a scary age in which Twitter feeds and Facebook posts can spark riots and overturn governments, but also an exciting age in which people can learn anything, see anything and buy anything from just about anywhere. It is a world in which the average phone is also a camera, a calculator, a GPS, a library, a bank, a school, a 4 education- upside- down/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0.

4 weatherman, a level, a compass and almost anything else that app producers can imagine. Such a world favors those who embrace it. Amazon.com, Kayak.com and Google Maps thrive while Circuit City, the local travel agent and paper mapmakers quickly become obsolete. In light of all of that, how will Bible colleges of the future look? No one knows for sure, but there is a growing awareness of the need to understand and utilize the technologies while continuing to focus on outstanding Bible teaching and effective ministry training. I predict that thriving Bible colleges of tomorrow will likely be known for the following as well. Innovation Virtual classes, flipped classes and integrated classes will become commonplace. Many younger students will still choose to attend on campus and enjoy the full collegiate experience with lots of academic choices, but half of all higher education students in the United States are over twenty- four years of age. Many of them are eager to use their lives to make a difference. They will enroll in a Bible college to study God s Word, complete a degree and prepare for effective ministry by choosing the flexibility of online, virtual or hybrid options without needing to uproot family or interrupt current ministry. Globalization Students will enroll from around the world, and many will live abroad and study online. Schools will offer courses in multiple languages and develop mutually beneficial international partnerships. A number of Bible colleges are expanding internationally, and PIU is no exception. In addition to enrolling students from over fifty countries, Piedmont established an accredited branch campus in Egypt and translated an entire master s degree into Arabic. Dozens of graduates are now serving the Lord in Egypt and across the Middle East. A teaching site continues to be maintained in Bangladesh, and our graduates have planted churches across that country. In May we will graduate over a dozen students from Latin America with their Master of Arts in Biblical Studies degree. The entire program was delivered online and totally in Spanish. We are now translating into Vietnamese, have one course completed in Chinese and are in discussions for translating into French and Portuguese. By God s grace our vision is to obey the great commission and actually teach all nations. Integration Bible colleges will proactively pursue ethnic diversity and reflect the demographic makeup of their cities. Instead of waiting for the world to correct the church, Bible colleges will lead the way in bridging racial gaps by eschewing practices that might meet legal requirements but still result in de facto segregation. Collaboration Schools will cut costs, lower tuition and sharply improve quality by sharing resources and reducing duplications. Outstanding faculty will teach at a number of institutions, and students will choose courses and

5 instructors from a variety of likeminded schools. Academic credits will easily transfer back and forth between accredited institutions. Bible colleges will partner directly with churches and Christian schools to train lay leaders and teach the teachers. See the e4-12 advertisement elsewhere in this magazine for a current example. Anti- Inflation Bible colleges will continue to lead the way by providing quality, accredited education while keeping tuition much lower than our secular counterparts. By utilizing cutting edge technology and reducing duplication, Piedmont did the unthinkable this fall. We cut tuition by up to forty percent, which brought tuition for a typical, fulltime undergraduate student down to only $8,800 per year. Many of our students qualify for scholarships of around one third of tuition, bringing the annual amount down to around $5,800 (roughly equivalent to this year s full Pell Grant). Finally, these are exciting days for those who desire to thoroughly understand God s Word, long to have their lives count for eternity, and want to pursue the kind of training that will equip them for a lifetime of effective ministry. An affordable, flexible Bible college degree is now available to more people in more places with more choices than ever before. Dr. Daniel Anderson, the president of Appalachian Bible College, recently told me about how they are now offering courses at Mt. Olive Prison where they have some twenty- five students enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts in Bible and Theology. 5 The exciting goal is to have these men plant churches inside the prisons. There are scores of similar stories emerging from our Bible college movement, and this is truly an exhilarating age of opportunity. Let s make the most of it for the glory of God, the preeminence of Jesus Christ, the authority of the Scriptures and the spread of the gospel to the ends of the earth. 5 us/stories/new- ministry- for- abc.php.