This past week Logos Bible Software announced the creation of a new division at the company: Logos Mobile Education. I’m involved in that division. Logos Mobile Education is producing seminary-level courses that are delivered completely within Logos and tethered to the digital library resources and other research tools. These are not Logos tutorials. They are content-oriented courses. Entry level courses will have academic content at the level of beginning seminary courses. Elective courses will have more detail and presume a certain level of content knowledge on the part of students. We will also be creating a couple courses for people who have no knowledge of the Bible. One of those (an OT survey) is a course of mine (see below).
Course components include HD video lectures by experienced scholars, screencast videos that focus on how Logos could be used to validate a professor’s claim or show the basis on which a claim is made, directed links into the library that target the best articles or paragraphs on a given subject covered in lectures, and our own private social networking platform (Faithlife) for interaction with others working through the same course. There are also links that perform searches for students on various points of the lecture material, syllabi, custom graphics, and self-assessment tools. Videos are searchable at the word level within the software (for Logos users, basically every element of a course works like a Logos book does within the software). Video content is also delivered in short segments (5-7 minutes is the norm). Everything is platform agnostic and can be watched on handheld devices. In short, while there is video content in any given Mobile Ed course, these are much more than video courses of some guy standing at the back of a classroom.
I’m not sure which courses will ship first or in what order. We’re still making those decisions. We’ve already had ten professors from around the country contribute video content (some for more than one course). I’ve also been videoed for five different courses.1 We have another half dozen scholars booked to film courses this summer. It’s a good start on what we hope will be a revolution in the way people learn about the Bible and theology. If you’re interested, read the launch post and follow the discussion. We’ll be blogging more at the Logos blog about what Mobile Ed is and isn’t, as well as the rationale of the approach we’re taking.
- Those courses are: OT Survey – a basic OT survey that presumes no knowledge of the OT; Introducing Bible Interpretation – an introduction to Hermeneutics; How we Got the Old Testament; Howe we Got the New Testament; and an elective we’re calling “Jewish Trinity” – a course going through the evidence for godhead thinking in the Old Testament – my dissertation material on the two powers. ↩
Let us know when it launches.
I’ll post up-dates, especially when pricing appears. When the first courses ship, though, the pre-pub pricing will go away.
Will this affect your MEMRA course work in any way, as in it will be retired in favor of the LOGOS stuff?
nope; MEMRA is separate; no relation. Logos isn’t going to be doing traditional Greek and Hebrew courses.
I have a seminary trained friend who has started a fledgling college level bible school/seminary in a country that historically has not had such an animal. I will talk to him in a couple days. Would like to have him talk to someone at Logos to understand how this might work for his situation.
Thanks.
Tell him to call the desk (the number is on the front page of the website) and ask for Pete Heiniger.