ST101OL - Critical Review

ST101OL - Highlights and Lowlights

The final grade was posted a couple days ago for ST101OL which means it's time to reflect on how things went in the course.  So I'll offer a critical review of the class and my performance throughout.  As with any endeavor, there were things that were done well, and things that could have been done better.  Without pulling any punches, here are my highlights and lowlights.

ST101OL - Theological Method and Bibliology

There are a lot of different ways to evaluate a class and my intention is to be as objective as possible.  However, it's also important to gauge how subjectively valuable the course was to me personally and how much it contributes to my personal goals in attending DTS.  So this breakdown will cover the gamut in terms of criteria.  I like the format that I used for reviewing my last class, so you'll forgive me for just sticking with that script.

Professor: Dr. Kreider was an excellent professor in this class.  Despite the videos being about two years old, he was very responsive to emails and posts when engaged and his feedback was thought-provoking and excellent.  Dr. Kreider definitely challenges the student to think and consider study topics in ways that may seem new.  This is a good thing and on more than one occasion I really found myself struggling to wrap my head around the subject matter - it was at these times that Dr. Kreider was most supportive and helpful in giving me just enough information to allow me to jump over the challenge at hand.  His classroom presence was excellent and his style of teaching was engaging and interesting.  I honestly was bummed when the lectures were finished because I wanted the class to keep going.

Texts:  There were a ton of texts for this class and the reading is something that must be planned for accordingly.  If you fall behind on the reading, there is little hope for recovering so don't do it.  For the most part, the texts were interesting and supported the learning very well.  A couple of the texts are worth reading twice for maximum retention and for responding to the assignments.  I think all the reading was necessary, but I realize that I didn't retain as much as I would have liked.  That's always going to be the case but I think the main objectives were covered extremely well by the reading.  Did I mention to be careful not to fall behind on the reading?

Online Format: As usual, the online format was robust and great.  I love how you can speed up the playback time on the videos to save a little time overall.  Besides, as the video is playing, I'm also reading along with the transcript which really helped me soak up the material.  I also love how I can play a lecture over if I am struggling to remember something clearly.  This is definitely one of the areas where the online format is superior to a classroom format.  I'm not saying that online learning is better than classroom learning, just that this is one of those areas where the online format is most helpful.  The one thing I didn't like about this particular course was that the slides were not available for download.  The transcripts were, but not the slides.  This did little to the move the needle on the overall experience, but there were a few slides I would have liked to download for my own learning purposes.

Graduate Teaching Assistant:  From my undergrad and previous graduate work, I always had a less than stellar opinion about GTAs.  I repent of my foolishness.  Once again I had an outstanding GTA who was engaging, gracious, and helpful at all the right times.  Very polite and professional when emailing with him and he was very thorough with his feedback on my assignments.  I found his feedback quite fair and he really forced me to think and reflect on things I might have missed or could have focused on more deeply.  This was very helpful.  Just like Dr. Kreider, my GTA never gave me the answers when I sought help but gave me enough information that with a little thought I was able to formulate my responses to my own satisfaction.

Grading: I'm not going to comment on the video lectures or the reading assignments as those are just checklist tasks that have to be completed.  After that, there were 3 major areas of grading; the interactions, the assignments, and the final exam.

The interactions in this course were extremely difficult for me in terms of the subject matter that the interactions were addressing.  It was very interesting to engage with my fellow students and have meaningful dialogs.  In this course, I think these interactions really did aid in the learning of the topic and concepts that were being addressed.

Next, the assignments were very time consuming and these were exercises that could not be put off until the last minute.  Despite always starting my assignments well before the due date, I nonetheless found myself butting right up against the deadlines.  Maybe that's just my style, but I spent a lot of time writing and rewriting material until I was satisfied with my work.  I knew these assignments were going to be challenging, so I was well prepared to handle them - but mark my words, don't fall behind and wait until the last minute - it won't end well.

Finally, the final exam was 25 questions and pretty straightforward.  Honestly, I didn't study much (excuse me ... at all) for my final and it showed in my result.  But that was really by design on my part and I'll discuss that a little further later.

Overall I found the grading to be timely, objective, fair, and gracious.  The grading was really based on the thinking behind the interactions and the assignments as opposed to focusing strictly on the output.  I really appreciated that and found that to be very motivational and encouraging.

Time Commitment:  I spent nearly 4.5 hours per credit hour per week on this course for a total of roughly 13 hours per week or 21.3 hours per module.  I totaled about 213 hours of work over the course of the semester.  Yes, this is slightly more than I would have liked to commit to this course, but given the mountain of reading required, I kind of knew going into the class it was going to take more time to complete.  If you're a fast reader, you might not spend as much time on the modules as I did.

Learning Objectives:  This class definitely satisfied all of the learning objectives of the course set out in the beginning.  Every single one of the learning assignments was challenging for different reasons which were both a little frustrating and ironically motivating.  If you're like me, you won't submit anything in this course with a feeling of - nailed it.  These assignments really stretch your thinking and push you to take some chances.  This is a good thing though.  It's better to mess up something here than out on the street when you're engaging someone in conversation.  But I left this course with a better understanding of theological method and the common theological terminology.  I also learned a fair bit about other worldviews and of course a little more about dispensationalism.

Personal Impact:  This class impacted me full stop.  I was very challenged to reflect on things that I perhaps had previously taken for granted.  I honestly changed my position on certain things a little bit.  There were no epiphanies for me in this course (which is good), but I've come to a more gracious position on a number of theological points.  Additionally, the formulation of a doctrinal statement on bibliology was an outstanding exercise and despite being about as easy as writing your resume, was my favorite learning assignment this semester by far.  The final personal impact for me was around the area of discernment.  Most of the learning activities required a lot of thought and dealt with subjects that required a lot of discernment and consideration of differing views.  While this was a very serious matter, I also found it very educational and quite frankly, fun.

Overall:  They say what you get out of something is what you put into it.  Yeah, I say that's pretty accurate.  This is a class that requires a lot of your time, effort, and energy if you want to get the most out of it.  But it is totally worth it.  I was challenged, encouraged, and motivated to keep giving more and more and I got so much out in the end.  I really loved my hermeneutics class, but this was more challenging and for that ST101OL is now my favorite course thus far at DTS.  I hope they keep just getting better and better!

Highlights:

• Online format affords a high degree of flexibility in managing time for completing assignments.
• Faculty and staff are highly committed to the students and their learning.
• Online format delivers information in multiple formats which significantly enhances the ability to learn and retain information (video, audio, transcripts).
• The material is thought-provoking and challenging.  This is not a class you can sleepwalk through.
• Learning assignments supported the material well and were interesting and quite frankly, fun.
• Grading was forgiving and supported the student's application of the material.

Lowlights:

• This class requires a little more time due to the reading assignments and the nature of the material on which the learning assignments are based.  This is not overly burdensome, just a recognition that more work than usual is required.
• The reading required is immense and you must plan accordingly or risk falling desperately behind.  I stayed on top of things just fine by always putting a book in my hand when I had some free time.  But if you slip here, it'll be rough.
• Some of the material tackled in the class requires more personal study in other fields and areas.  Having a more scientific education background, I was a little unprepared for the philosophical background of some of the learning.  Therefore, I had to spend some time to catch up in this area, but the way the class was structured, I was able to learn the necessary background comfortably without running the risk of falling behind.  It's a little unfair to call this a lowlight, it's more of a just so you know what you're getting into kind of a thing.

Strategy

So I think it's helpful to discuss a little bit my approach to the class and give you some best practices for getting the most out of the class and meeting your goals.

1. Read Jack Deere's book (Module 10) the first week of class before you do anything else.  The largest learning assignment is a response to this book that will take a lot of time and planning to do well.  If you read this early and take some notes, it'll give you time to read it a second time later before the assignment.  I was thankful that I did this as I really saw so much more in the book when reading it the second time that helped me cut through the clutter and quickly formulate a clear strategy for my response.  Plus, if you've already gone through the book once, Dr. Kreider's comments in the lecture make a lot more sense and also help prepare you for the assignment.
2. I hate exams.  I hate exams because I really suck at taking them.  My goal academically speaking was to get an A in the class and I didn't want to have to rely on my test taking skills to be the difference between an A or A- or B+.  Therefore, my strategy was to really focus all of my time and effort on the interactions and learning assignments.  The idea was that if I did really well on those, the final exam would be more of an afterthought in terms of impacting my final grade.  So I reasoned that even without studying much, I should be able to manage a 50% or better on my final exam.  As the final only counted for 5% of the final grade, that left me with a little wiggle room on my assignments.  For me, that was an acceptable risk worth taking.  I'll also note that there was no A+ listed in the syllabus for this class so I was looking at scoring better than a 96 for an overall grade.
3. Two learning assignments account for 40% of the final grade.  One is a doctrinal synthesis paper (2 pages single-spaced), and the other is a theological method response to Deere's book (15 pages double-spaced).  My plan was to start these as soon as I could to maximize my time to rewrite and revise.  Both are uniquely challenging for different reasons and I honestly believe it would be difficult if not impossible to produce fine quality work by waiting until the last minute.  That goes double for the theological method paper - I was so sick of looking at it by the time I turned it in *smile*.

So How Did I Do?

Please keep in mind that I am only a part-time student and have taken only four credits this semester.  Therefore, I was able to focus most of my academic studies on this one course.  That would not have been the case with a full course load...

Well, the risk I took ended up paying off.  I really worked hard on the learning assignments, especially those two noted above and did very well on all of them.  That was good because I totally laid an egg on the final scoring a 72/100.  While I would have liked to have done better on that test, it was a moot point as my work on my learning assignments paid off and I finished with a grade of 98.35 which was good enough for an A in the class.  My learning assignments weren't perfect, but good enough to allow me to achieve my academic goal.

I won't lie, I'm pretty proud of my grade here.  That said, I loved this class so much I would have gladly taken any grade I received.  The grade here is more a reflection of my effort than my learning.  I learned far more in excess of what the grade indicates, regardless of my dumpy score on the final...