Buford Cox: I'm especially pleased to see how many of us are still active in the field. It seems like that for the last few years at this session most of the people were retired - and we are so grateful for the heritage that you have set before us, and especially those of you who have been in one place for so many years (I think about the [Louis] Balls, how many years at Carson Newman? [Dr. Ball's response: Thirty-five.] Oh my goodness, I just can't imagine, but maybe someday) - but anyway, I am so glad to see so many of you that are still active in the field, both at the conference and in here today.

One little bit of business that we need to take care of, and then we'll get on with our program. Eric Benoy from New Orleans Seminary is the East representative, he still has one more year to serve, and I'm going to call on our new Vice-President for Education, Glenn Eernisse, from Brewton Parker College, to come and make the nomination for the West representative that we need to elect today.

Glenn: Thank you, Buford, I would like to nominate Ron Bowles from Dallas Baptist University.

Buford: Ron Bowles is the nominee for the West representative. Would anyone from the floor like to nominate someone else. Okay, all in favor of Ron Bowles, please raise your hand. There we go. Okay, congratulations, and thank you for being willing to serve. It's a lot of fun to be in this position, so thank you very much.

Our program today has to do with distance education, and when I use the term, I'm speaking mostly of using technology to reach students who are not in the same physical location. I know our school has several distance sites, as many of yours do, but where there's a teacher in the classroom at those sites. So when we talk about distance learning in this context, I'm talking about online learning, maybe computer interactive TV.

Our chairman has been given a year to figure out what we can offer online and how to do that, so I'm particularly interested in hearing what we will hear today, but out of necessity, the faculty of New Orleans has gained a lot of experience in a short time with distance education, and so I've called on them and asked them if they would just share their experiences and insights, and I'm sure that they will have a chance for us to ask questions.

Ken, I'll just call on you as the Chair to start our program.

Ken Gabrielse: It has been an interesting year for us at New Orleans Seminary. The Seminary has historically been out front with some of the distance education kinds of things. Dr. Landrum Leavell, when he was there for twenty years, began us on a process of stretching seminary education out, and we now have twenty different centers where theological training goes on. But historically, music has not been part of that. We held dearly to our NASM [National Association of Schools of Music] accreditation, and they helped us determine that distance education was not a direction that musicians want to travel yet. I, with some of you, would go to NASM meetings and we would have our breakouts on distance education - where it's going, what's happening - and every time you would go in the rooms, there would be more questions about the future of classroom and studio education than any one person could answer. Now, there are always people out there trumpeting the potential for it, and we know the technology is available. You've seen the commercials on TV, where you've got the violin teacher in one place and the student somewhere else being trained that way. It's going to happen. I don't know how many of you have the technology to be able to do it yet, or the money in the budget to get it started. We're not there yet.

The New Orleans Seminary has for many years done compressed interactive video (CIV). We now have six sites that are able to be reached or connected in some way or another. On our faculty, Dr. Michael Sharp has -- he's the only faculty member who is not able to be with us this week. I wish he were -- has taught most for us in the CIV world, the CIV realm. Michael teaches specifically in the area of worship. And we all know that those classes will be the easiest to approach in this way, the practical church music approach kind of things, or the philosophical, theological things we can do in lecture and report and hear back and forth and question and answer.

How are we going to do the other things? And that's kind of where we were thrown this year. How are we going to do music theory? How am I going to do conducting when I can't get to those folks? I love being in a room with a group of conductors, talking about the process and the planning and the physical motions that are made with conducting. How do you do it long-distance? I'm not sure I have any answers for that. I would love to say that we could do it by compressed interactive video, and we are exploring that. Obviously we could e-mail back and forth about potential problems; we can talk on the phone.

What I did this year, we had classes both semesters and I traveled many miles to see students. That's how I did conducting. How did we do voice distance education? Well, we did it by traveling many miles. We still haven't found a really good way to do it. I have no answers for you on that, it's just are you willing to be able to do some of these things.

I think, I believe, that with the way churches are now, how we perceive it where we are, they are ready for anybody anywhere to help them lead and plan music for their churches. They are getting some people who don't have a lot of training in that. They have some potential, and they have some ministry calling, and they recognize that, and they need some help. I think all of us are going to have to come to a point that we are willing to go help them, rather than them coming to us. I just know that we're not as moveable as we once were. Students are not as moveable as they once were. They are ready to find a place quickly and get into the work. Those of you in colleges, you know they are still ready to go to college, but when they get done with college they want to go to work. That's what we're finding at the seminary.

Dr. Michael Sharp has taught CIV for us; all of us have talked about how we're going to do that. Darrell Farrington is going to be teaching the church music administration courses, planning them in CIV and in one-week workshops. Ed Steele is our resident on-line guru, who has now put all of -- we did a strange thing, and we have to apologize to Dr. [Harry] Eskew in some way, but he's the one who taught us in these things - but we took - my favorite class in seminary was sacred choral literature (I'm a conductor) and when Dr. Eskew taught it it was a passion; we loved that class - but we took that class and we combined it with hymnology (sacrilege! I know some people would think that) but the reason is because the music that the congregation sings and the music that the choir sings should be more connected. And we call it Church Music in Worship and Performance, which is really what it is. So why do we study them separately? We put them together.

The other thing is, we had to get six hours in three blocks into six hours in two blocks, and that was the way to do it. And Ed Steele has actually developed all online teaching sessions with lectures, with videos, with audio, things that can go along with that, and that continues to be developed. And those courses he did this last year both semesters with a lot of online helps. Each course met two times in the semester. They would come together in a place. This is another thing that we hope, as you are discovering and we'll hear from you, we want to meet with students. All of us were taught to get into a room and hash through these things, and we want that time with students. We couldn't do it. We had no place to go. We'd find churches that would host us and we'd get the students. We set up traveling funds - Kodaly International helped us with that, church musicians helped us with that - and we set up music student traveling funds and they would travel to a place and we would meet with them for two or three days in a workshop setting, but a lot of the teaching Ed did was already online.

Dr. Lombard has been finding a lot of resources to teach music theory online, and those of you who teach theory know that it's available, you're just not real comfortable with it, are you? What are they learning? Well, distance education obviously puts the onus of the learning back on the student, and we don't have the immediate response that we all want. We want to see it in their beady little eyes that they are getting it. We want to hear in their own voice that they are singing all those intervals correctly and they are doing all those things. But there are some resources that are already out there that are designed to do it. We were just forced to look at it and say, "What are some helps that we can give the student," and Dr. Lombard helped some of the students with theory resources online: "Here are some things to learn."

We also had to redesign all of our degrees this year, and that is something that just happened that way, we had to tighten up some things. We did lose two faculty members out of the storm, and we know that one of those won't be replaced anytime soon. One, Leo Day, will be replaced about a year from now. We're on somewhat of a freeze, because after something like what we went through you don't know what you have to work with until you are into the new year and see where the student counts are. So we believe we will be able to replace Leo Day, but not Gary Hallquist in the foreseeable future, so we'll be able to cover that. But the degrees that we now offer - and I want you to understand that we still hold our NACM accreditation highly, but our degrees now are branching out from that in a lot of ways - we do offer now a certificate in worship studies (that is undergraduate level, and is not accredited), we offer an associate degree in church music that is NASM accredited. We offer a bachelor of arts in music that is also NASM accredited. Those are three undergraduate offerings; two are NASM accredited. The master's degrees are the Masters of Music in Church Music, which is NASM accredited, the Masters of Divinity in Church Music, which is NASM accredited. Then we offer the Master of Arts in Worship Studies and the Master of Divinity in Worship Studies. Then this year we're also approved to begin offering the Doctor of Ministry in Worship Studies and the Doctor of Educational Ministry in Worship Studies. Both of those are ATS [Association of Theological Schools] accredited, but will not be any music accreditation at all, we're not looking for that; don't really want it in those areas.

I talked to Harold Best for quite a while this last year and tried to get some counsel from him about accrediting in distance education and workshops and CIV. He said, "Ken, fulfill your mission and let NASM catch up." So, that's what we're going to try to do. Fulfill your mission and let whoever needs to catch up with that. And they might not. The good thing is, I don't have to write a self-study until 2010, so I have a little bit of time to let them catch up.

That's kind of where we are. I want Ed Steele to come up and just share a word with you about teaching what essentially is hymnology and music history online. He has also developed the undergraduate music histories as online courses. Remember, as we're saying this, none of us in our division actually like the fact that we're in this position of teaching distance education because we do like the classroom. That's how we learned, that's how we thrived; we love seeing the students and being with them, flesh and blood. We also realize that times have changed, students have changed. They want to know that you are willing to do what it takes to teach them, or some of them won't give you the time of day. Ed has found a way to give them that time of day.

Ed Steele: Out of more necessity than creative desire, I'll put it that way. We were grateful enough to already, many of you are on Blackboard [www.blackboard.com], are familiar with that format. And I had already taken the notes and exams and had that already. I found out that if I could put my exams and weekly quizzes on Blackboard, I didn't take up class time for weekly quiz. And it gave the students time, on their schedule, to take a weekly quiz, and Blackboard will grade it for you.

Ken: You had that before...

Ed: I had that done before, yes sir.

Voice: What is Blackboard?

Ed: Blackboard is an online service that schools, there are several different ones, eCollege [www.eCollege.com] is another, I think we were on eCollege a few years ago. Blackboard, you can buy the module yourself and run it out of your own, you don't have to go to the internet remote site, it can be run from your server at your school. So the school has its own version of it that we run all our classes, and students can get schedules and all that kind of stuff though that. In fact, we are about to be able to put students' control sheets that will help them with their planning.

Blackboard has a multifaceted interface where you can have threaded discussion, or discussion groups, chat room types of things. You can download videos or links to other sites internally on the site, and within your course, or externally on the internet or other places. It has a test generator. You can create about six or eight different types of exams, including discussion. Obviously, it doesn't grade discussion questions, but it does grade multiple choice, or things that pretty much have a defined answer. I was already doing that with music history and some other things, but we obviously had the listening in class.

When Katrina hit, the listening element - I went nuts - you've got to have the listening available. I found www.classicalmusic.com - if you don't have it, our school library has a subscription now, they can go through my pass code. The class goes through that, you can set up your own listening. You can have them do the research, or you can pull up specific play lists that they log onto for that class. All the Norton, the twelve CDs for the Norton are on there. You just pull that up. It already has some pre-selected lists, but the students have a downloadable form that they would listen to and report back from and we kept in contact that way. That was a way to get the listening section and really free up their time when they did it. Now, obviously, there is an amount of discipline there that they really have to do it. Blackboard allows you to set up a time that you set up in folders, each week is a different folder. The folder will come online at a specific date and hour. If they don't get it within that time the folder disappears, and a part of their grade with it, so it was very motivational for them to get in there and get with it.

Then one of the things that we did in another class similar to that was, I wanted to have some face to face lecture. You can do some compressed video - this was not streaming video - with a web cam you can sit down and do some mini-lectures or break a major lecture up into five-minute segments, because if you have students that have a telephone line and not DSL or cable, they'll retire before they download that whole thing. You've got to do it in three- to five-minute segments so someone that's got a 14.4 telephone line doesn't spend four hours trying to download something, and sometimes it can take a good two and a half for a five-, six-minute video if you don't. So you make it small, concise, it made me rehash my notes. "What is the real important thing that they've got to know?" Once I got those things in each chapter, or the major points that I would have lecture outside of the class or outside of the textbook, I could put that on video, put it up on the site, then they download it and watch it when they want to. They can make all the faces they want, they can fall asleep, I don't really care because they've downloaded it and they eventually will get it. But that's been a real help in terms of listening, the notes were there, and then the threaded discussion, Blackboard allows you to literally count when they get on, how long they are on, and how many times they hit that particular site, so each week you can measure how long they've been in your course. And we required at least, a major topic, and to respond to one, they respond to the topic or theme that's discussed that week, and then they had to respond to two other students that were responding. That was the minimum. The neat thing is that when you get a paper on line, you can grade it in Word or WordPerfect and e-mail it back, and you never have to handle paper, which got to where I really did like. They had thirteen weeks of TDS, that meant thirty-nine minimum times that they had to log on, you could check that each week. Besides, you follow the discussion, but if a student complained about it, all you have to do is show the record. "Sorry, you really weren't engaged here." And it gave me a backup in terms of how to judge their participation as well as their thread of discussion and how they did it.

I don't claim to be a guru. I was confused as most. My wife had six online classes and over seventy students. I had this last semester about forty or fifty, is all. One of my students was in Hamburg, Germany. One of my students did his paper, the University of Hamburg translated all his stuff and sent it back to me. Fortunately it wasn't in German. Spanish, all right, but not in German. But they really were scattered all over the place. You can do it. You can have chat discussions, you can do a myriad of things - my wife did a lot of that kind of stuff - if you don't limit yourself to just thinking like you've always been taught. It's been a positive experience. There are some things I don't want to do again, but there are some things that lend themselves to get that student that doesn't want to leave his job, come to one place and study. Can we reach that student that's got a full-time job, he's got a family, he wants to prepare, but what does he do? I think distance learning may be our hope.

Voice: Once you've taught a course online, and you've basically gone through all the effort to get your lectures and your exam materials, etc. - assuming the first time you do it it's going to take you quite a bit of time, but the first time you teach any course it's going to take you quite a bit of time - but once you've taught it once online, how would you characterize the difference between meeting the class in a classroom three times a week for an hour each and the class preparation you would do for that, and the grading of the exams and papers you would do for that; how would you compare that time involvement with the time involvement in teaching a course online, per week?

Ed: I've done both, and especially with the Worship Perspectives class (we had thirty-eight online students for that) and what surprised me was the second time around in repeating the course - in fact, I had two sections of Worship Perspectives - online will take longer. Just count on it. Your students will think, "Oh, I can take a lot of online classes." That's a lie. An online class will take longer than you expect. It takes more preparation initially, because there's so much front-end stuff, but if they have active involvement in that, it won't be something that you just do once, "Okay, I got that done," it really does need some upkeep. You need some way so that the material is fresh to you. The front end will be done, but the weekly discussion or the weekly contact with the students - before the semester I had thirty-eight in the class. If each one of those sends you two e-mails in the week, you have e-mails out the wazoo.

Voice: That's a computer term.

Ed: That's a computer term. I have a good Spanish term if you want it. You will spend more time reading and trying to answer or decipher e-mail and working with a student that way. A student can hide in class. He can hide back there if there are a bunch of talkers in class and you've got one or two that are quiet, man, he's feliz de la vida, man, he's happy. You can't hide online. You either participate or you sink. So that student who is shy, he's got to come out of his shell, he has to jump in there to do anything. I found out even the second time around it takes a lot of time.

Voice: Okay, so, as your administrator, can you make a plausible case that you should get more that three hours credit for doing this course because it takes more time online?

Ed: I think one of the best things that happened before, I would think the general attitude for all of us, was that online class took less time. Now that we've baptized through fire, I think most of us would say, you know, this takes much more time than I thought.

Voice: But you're never going to prove it.

Ed: I'm not the administrator.

[laughter]

Ken: I am. Let me say a word. All of us, not just the music faculty...I was one of the group that went to Atlanta. When the storm hit we were in Monroe, and Dr. Kelly said, "Get to Atlanta, we're re-tooling," I was in all the meetings from the beginning. And all the faculty - you will love this - all the faculty were there, there were about twelve faculty there - a skeleton staff - we began setting up offices, and in two weeks we had different rooms set aside in the building there for offices. The whole faculty office was an old Sunday School department room, with the little tiny cubicles off to the side. The cubicles were for the administrators. Now, I'm not one of the entire over-scheme, so I'm sitting out in the pool of everybody, and we're just going through this online stuff all the time, the amount of time it takes, and you're hearing back from faculty out in the field, having to set up all that it takes, and we recognize how much it takes.

Lloyd, I'm not sure that any of us are going to be able to justify more than three hours. If you get more than three hours for a three hour class, just count your blessings. The upfront time, to set up the first time you teach it, is the big time. And what most of our faculty found out, not just including the music faculty, everybody talking around there, is the second time you do it you begin to limit the things that you ask the students to respond to, but you begin to put more of the onus on them as far as the quizzes that they have.

Now, a word about quizzes: you time them. If it's a quiz that you can take and answer every question correctly in a minute, then you give them a minute-fifteen. And they are timed in and time out a minute-fifteen. That way you know they didn't go back to the book. If you don't want an open-book test, then you do it by time. Everybody's saying, "but they get to look at their notes." Well, not if you set it up. You set up every parameter in this type of program: the type of test it is, everything about it. The way you limit, sometimes, your actual feedback with the student is by these quizzes and the things that they need to learn on their own. Remember, this is something that is driven by the students. Not every student responds well to online teaching. In our minds we think - I've got a twenty-four year-old son, he would learn online all day long, I mean that would just be his passion, but I know other twenty-four year-olds that wouldn't learn a thing online; they would just find a game online and play it, or they would multi-task and would have two screens set up and just go back and forth doing different things - so that's one thing, you set up the parameters for how they are going to learn. What happens is, after the first time, you realize, you know, I've got to cut down on the thread-of-discussion series that we're running, or I've got cut down on this part, or I've got to increase the student's awareness in this particular area.

You have to be on top of it updating what you're giving them. Plus, you are always at the whim of technology. We have had some situations where things have gone down this year. We're living in New Orleans. There are still no house phone lines in Gentilly. There are business phone lines, but not to individual houses. There is still no cable television where we are living at the seminary. It's coming back slowly. There are some of those limitations. We could tell you many stories about how life is. Those of you have been on the mission field know this is a mission situation.

Two other things, and then I'm going to ask some of them to respond, and then you can ask them questions. This year, I graded my first PHD dissertation online, and I graded two D-Min projects online. I must admit, once I figured out how all of that worked, I really enjoyed it because I could do some things so much faster than writing it out. I can type so much faster than I can write, I can grab thoughts and see them on the whole page setup, it was just a really freeing experience to do that. Plus, when I sent it back to them they could respond immediately. It was a good experience and we will probably end up doing that in the future anyway, even though we are back on campus, asking them to submit them online so that the faculty can have them on their computer and not have to carry around the whole thing.

Voice: How are the ensembles going?

Ken: Obviously, that's one of those...yeah. And again, in talking with Harold Best about this, the biggest issue was what to do about ensembles and how to handle that. What we did this year is, if they were enrolled in the fall semester they stayed enrolled in every class that they wanted to be in, ensembles included, and they had to join a civic or community ensemble where they relocated, and they had to participate in rehearsals and programs and send me the programs so I would have that in my files. Do we like that? No, because, again, I'm a conductor. I did not conduct a choir until I got back to church in January. So the whole fall semester was gone. This was the first year I didn't do Christmas in any place. It was tough. It has not been an easy year in many ways, well, for anybody. This is not a pity party, this is just what God had planned, and we're fine with it. We're okay. Are we happy? No. But He knows that, He hears that all the time.

The spring semester, we basically ended up doing the same thing. The same thing with recital laboratory. They had to go find things, and we helped them, you go online and look, "where are you located?" "Jackson, Mississippi." "Well, let's go on some Jackson web sites and see what's available. Look, here's Millsaps College is doing some really nice things, so here, here's your requirements to fulfill for recital lab." And I got more PDF files with programs, guys scanning the program, this is what I attended, and they would say, "Hey, this was great," and "this was bad, why did I go to that?" You know, I never got that response when the recital lab was happening in our building, they just signed the thing and left. I don't know, we may be continuing some of that.

Becky Lombard: I had a keyboard student, a piano student, who was to do her hearing the day of the storm, so she wound up in Tennessee, so I called Richard Joiner at Union and he put her on his recital schedule and she did it...

Ken: I did three conducting recitals this year. I did one in Alexandria, Louisiana, we did one in Northeast Mississippi, and I just finished one back in New Orleans. But the one in Northeast Mississippi I was not able to attend. What she did - she has done her conducting lessons with me, her classes, her conducting pedagogy, so it's recital time, it's the fall semester, but she's from the Ukraine, her visa ran out in January. She needed to finish her degree, so I said, okay, here's some possibilities, I said, find some ministers of music in your area. Now, everybody in the fall was real sympathetic when you said New Orleans. After January there's not so much sympathy out there, and we understand that too, it was fine. But in the fall, she was able to line up three churches, three ministers of music, get their best singers out of their choir; she put together a choir of about twenty-two people, a good balance; we'd picked some repertoire before, she finished it, we e-mailed back and forth, she said what about this, I said fine, this is what we'll do. She set up four rehearsals, and sent me her recital online, a video download. I graded it online, and it was wonderful. I was so impressed. She learned much, I learned much. Did I like it? No. I didn't, because I like to be there and respond, be there at that last rehearsal and help. Couldn't do any of that, but we got done the way we needed to get done. It can work, but the student has to be really motivated to get it done. Her motivation was her visa, and it was a big motivation.

Any questions?

Voice: Can you explain compressed interactive video?

Ken: Surely. CIV, we've had it at New Orleans Seminary about, what, ten, twelve years? We did some early things with it. Compressed interactive video, is, we have rooms set up, we have two at the main campus, and we have one, maybe two in Atlanta, we have one in Orlando, one at LifeWay. What happens is, if you are on campus, let's say this is my on-campus class, and this is a compressed interactive video room. Inside this room would be all of you, my students, there would be a TV. camera back there, there might be another one on the side. I would have a console here as the teacher that would have a computer, that would have a document camera where I could actually put a book down there. Now, live video feed is compressed, and is being sent to these other sites, where there are other students there that also have cameras on them. I can see them, and they can see me. There are television monitors in my room and there's a big TV. in their room, and they are looking at me teaching. Also, the cameras in the room can pan to the students, you - Rob's got a question - so the camera goes to him, and these are remote cameras so they can be operated by a single person in the back, or they can zoom back and get the whole room so we can see Rob, there. He raises his hand, he stands up and asks the question. Then the student in Atlanta responds to Rob because he thinks, "Man what's he talking about? He's crazy!" And so we get this discussion back and forth.

I mentioned this commercial on TV., has anyone seen that commercial? They are touting technology, obviously, but that's the kind of technology they are talking about. We have gone through many cycles of that, starting out twelve, fifteen years ago. Used to be really jerky. Now, the audio was good, but the picture would kind of stop-start. It's very smooth now. The document feeder - anything that's done on computer - if you have a presentation that you are making, audio, visual, anything - is automatically on their TV. there. In fact, I think - Eric, if I'm wrong, are there two TVs there, one document and one live, where they can see both?

Eric Benoy: Yeah, but it can be switched where you can look at two centers at one time, or one can be document and one can be the other view, can sweep around.

Ken:  Yeah, um, there's just a lot of possibilities with it. Now, when I've gone to NASM, you know, the fall meetings...you go to those breakout sessions and they have some guru standing up saying, "well, I'm teaching piano that way, and this is how you do it."  That's what they are using, a type of CIV, where there's real time response.

[unintelligible]

You have to have it on both ends. We're talking fairly expensive technology. Now, we do hope in the near future, we've made an initial proposal, we want to have a CIV room set up in the music building. Since it's already at the other sites, we want to have that in the Sellars music building, a small room that has everything we've talked about to be able to reach the other sites.

Voice: How do you archive the information, or do you [unintelligible]...

Becky: Blackboard.

Eric: You can do Blackboard, or you also have the option of recording to VHS or down to DVD, can record both sessions.

Ken: We have had faculty teach CIV one semester, and have that on archive, then the next semester they might teach another section of it, but might have to miss because of a mission trip or something, so they set up the DVD of that day so that the students don't miss that class session. We have not done a full semester. We have begun experimenting with what we call "Course in a Box." Is anybody familiar with that? I know Stan does, because they are dealing with all of this at B. H. Carroll (University). "Course in a Box" is where the student enrolls for this at almost any time, but the whole course is designed to be given, you can give them a notebook at the beginning with every lecture on DVD, all of your notes. They do all of their work, go online to Blackboard to take all of their tests. Now, how does music work that way? We're still trying to figure that out. We know some courses, worship courses, will work with some of those. The administrative courses will work that way. Darrell's still struggling with the education part of it. How do you teach Music Ed. when you want hands-on with those student. You guys jump in, Music Theory? We're still trying to figure all of that out.

Becky: You haven't lived until you've taught Music Theory I on the internet.

[laughter]

Ken: When we redesigned the things, we also put into our redesign - the handout there shows some curriculum choices. We showed our faculty, who votes on these changes, what are the possibilities of teaching these courses: Music Theory I, Music Fundamentals I, we determined was going to be very difficult to do in an online offering, because you need some face time, some classroom time, but we did believe we could do it in a...

Becky: No, Theory I is CIV.

Ken: Theory II, III, and IV we will do online component with a one-week workshop, five days, or two what we call weekend workshops which start on Thursday afternoon and go through Saturday morning in the semester, and that will be a pedagogical choice or a scheduling choice that we make in the beginning.

Becky: We did that in the spring and it worked very well.

Ken: It did. We had a very good Theory class in the spring.

Darrell Farrington: The negatives of this are evident, and quite glaring, you know, such as ensembles, etc., but there is a positive side to this. If you show the student, and remind them that once they get out of college or seminary there won't be another classroom, that your continued education depends on you, and you have the self-discipline to go out and do the research to do what you need to do this next Christmas or Easter presentation, or orchestra or whatever. Weaning them away from the classroom and from my own lecture, I put the onus on them to be the sparkplug for their own learning. And the reading assignments I gave each week, I had them generate their own questions, which I just compiled or tweaked a little, or filled in a gap if something important was there. But they learned that these tests are hard to make. The ones that they disliked the most were their own questions. They found that to write a good question is a hard thing: what is the important question I should be asking about this chapter or this topic, and it made them think about it in a different way. Of course, it made me start wondering at my own sanity when a student misses his own question. And it happened. He knew it happened, and oh golly, did I get an e-mail!

But there are some positives about this. You give projects: I want you to research this area, this software, and I want you to come back with a report that we can put on Blackboard and all download it. They all have readings on that same area, but he is responsible for the major presentation, and the major paper with examples and all this. So it puts more of the weight of generating the learning on them, which is really the way it will be in the real world when they get out of academia. With that understanding, it linked, it made more sense to them and they were willing to go through more of the tedium, more of the internet stuff, because they knew that this is the way it's really going to be in the real world when they get out of here.

There are other ways, the TDS, after the first week I couldn't do it. I couldn't type fast enough to keep up with them. But, I found a conference call company that for little or nothing per month, ten bucks per month or something like that, I could have up to twenty calls on one number and one designated hour a week they would have their reading and we would all dial in. I check roll and we have live discussion. It was more freeing, in fact, especially in classes like Spiritual Formation, or classes that deal with more sensitive areas, there was a little bit of anonymity, it was just a voice. These students had never met each other, many of them, so they feel more free to put their honest opinions out there. We had deeper discussions. They felt a freedom to share at a deeper level because we heard just voices. You grew to love those voices, but you didn't see my face, so there are some benefits there.

Voice: What about the emotional impact of the teacher. I remember the character or the emotions of the teachers. Can you get that over the telephone or the television?

Darrell: I miss that. Every time I picked up the phone for a conference call I missed that greatly, but it's amazing how much identity you realize aurally. I recognize that voice, and I know what they've said just by the tone of that voice or the inflection. So it does not compare to the classroom. I still like to go eye to eye, but when you have to, you try to find that silver lining.

Voice: Think of yourself as a blind student.

Becky: This semester I taught all my theories in the fall, completely online, and this semester I did the three weekend workshops, one in the beginning to get them started, one mid-term, and one final, and what I did was, they had a test first session when they arrived, they had an exam last session before they left, each of those three weekends, so that's how I did the testing. What I found by doing those weekend workshops, we basically all lived together for those two days. I took them to eat, we bought their meals, and we spent - Benjie and I just spent time with those students. And we had a student who had just come to seminary one week when Katrina happened. Seeing what was happening with the distance learning, he really was thinking about leaving until we had our first weekend workshop he said, "It doesn't get any better than this." We spent two solid days with them, eating our meals with them, talking about our church lives, and everything, so I think, if anything, I grew closer to those students than I usually do with them popping in for an hour a day.

The other thing, as I continue to do theory - and we've talked about in our whole faculty meeting, not just music - that the cameras are becoming so inexpensive now, that we will require students to have a camera at their computer where we can have the class discussions. I think that will be the key to doing theory online, ultimately. I can do face to face with them that way.

Ken: Any other questions?

Voice: Is it likely that you would require every student at the seminary to have one of these cameras, no matter what course they are in so that whatever course they are in, they are ready?

Ken: It's coming.

Voice: Most of them already have one.

Ken: You can now buy the cameras for $49 with all the software that goes with it. It's not a great camera, but it gets the image there.

Voice: Most of them don't have a great face, anyway.

[laughter]

Ken: I was going to be really nice and say most of us don't have a great face. We're hoping the seminary springs for the $59 model so we can do a little enhancement with the face thing there.

Voice: You have all these courses that you require texts, do they all have their texts?

Ken: Yes.

Ken: You have to remember that most of our students who lived on campus, which was all music students, lost every book they had.

Voice: No, but our students, they won't send them free texts.

Ken: Unless you have a hurricane. Unless you have flooding like we had. What happened was, we started the fall semester back up October 3, but none of us went back to campus until October 4. In fact, the city would not let us back in until that day, and then, anything that was on the first floor of any housing where we lived was completely destroyed. We planned on having no textbooks, nothing. Once we determined that the classes were going to start October 3, we all got with the publishers that we use and said, "Can you help us out," and they were all great. Now, that was one year. That's not going to happen again, but it happened this one year. Most of the students had already purchased their textbooks, they just lost them.

Eric Benoy is our music librarian. He is our biggest support in the research part of all this. Dr. Lombard is correct, he can find anything. He's also very much into what's happening with computer resources and very helpful. I would strongly suggest that if you are going to go that way that your music librarian become your best friend, and that also have some requirement about staying up with all resource material. And know Blackboard. Eric knows Blackboard like the rest of them know it. Know the stuff that the school uses.

Voice: How did you cope with applied lessons?

Ken: That's what I said, applied lessons, we went to them.

Becky: I called a friend...I had friends all over America that taught my students.

Ken: Again, that's one year. We're still struggling. We know that we can't offer a complete online music degree. It's not going to happen. We are not going to do it. We are going to offer components of the degree online, and we are going to offer specific parts of specific classes available online. We are going to have, in the fabric of what the seminary offers, we are going to have not NASM accredited music degrees, but our MAs and those other hybrid degrees, the worship study degrees for us, are going to be offered away from our campus at one of our hubs in Atlanta and Orlando. What we did with extension centers many years ago, and ATS and SACS [Southern Association of Colleges and Schools] both approved, is that the student had to take one third of their degrees on the main campus. With the hub setup, they have to take twelve hours on the main campus in New Orleans, and if they do the rest of it at the hub, and that is for a ninety hour M-Div, it's one third and it's one sixth - I don't remember what the percentages are. I'm a musician. I do four-four really well.

Voice: Are you hearing rumblings yet, "If you can develop a way to have these courses online, why go back to the campus?"

Ken: We are in a very comfortable position at New Orleans. We have a phenomenal president who supports us in myriad ways. He also loves campus, having things on our campus be beautiful at all times, and having the best of what we can get with what we are given. I don't see us ever, under his leadership, getting to the point that he would say, "Well, if you can offer it online, let me stick you in an office somewhere else so we don't have to have facilities anywhere." It's not going to happen with Dr. Kelley.

Remember, everything comes in cycles, and we're going to find, I think, for the future, students who say, "I really feel I need to go back to a building." Our biggest problem now is our people moving. They get settled in a place, and they want to find a way to learn while they are settled in that place. Now, you in colleges don't have that nearly as much. Tom, you are finding it at Southern. The reason people don't come is, "Well, that church hired me. I got $45,000 a year straight out of college. Why would I want to go to seminary?" Well, we all know that one of the reasons to go to seminary is to sit in a classroom or be with a group of people who are all going through the same things. It's not happening at college, they are getting a liberal arts education, they're going in every different direction. At seminary, they are all called to vocational ministry. For me, the biggest reason to go to seminary is still to be in that cauldron - excuse that terminology, especially on this date [June 6, 2006] - the cauldron of where everything is being stirred theologically for these people to have to deal with those things.

But it is happening online with what we've been talking about. The TDS thing that Darrell doesn't like - although some of our faculty like it, they can type fast enough to do it - because if you've got a class of twenty folks, and they are all on at the same time, you are running ragged. But you are reading these wonderful things happening, or you are able to isolate a student and take them out to the side, and you set up something different with just them. Say, "Let's talk about your processes here, your thoughts about these particular things." And then you get them back in.

So it can still happen, it's because we're all in vocational ministry preparation together. I would love to see, by the time I finish this, I would love to see students saying, "You know, I need to go back, to get back on campus." I think it's going to happen, though, with those folks who did online types of learning, when they get out in the real world and they are starting to struggle, and they say, "you know, we need to get back in with Dr. Bolton and get some refreshers." And the seminaries are going to have to start offering more workshops, these workshop-intensive types of things. "We've got to get back with Dr. Stam and we've got to figure out how this is supposed to work. I'm in a bigger church now, and there are a whole lot more questions." That's how we see it happening, we hope that's how it happens.

Ed Spann: At Dallas Baptist University, I think our policy is, if you prepare a course online, you get paid the same thing as you would to teach it one semester. And if you are teaching a course that's already been online, you only get a certain percentage.

Ken: We do have some things in the administrative works. We were forced to prepare this year because of the situation. There was nothing in the faculty manual saying you are going to get X-amount. The Course in a Box I mentioned earlier, we do have stipends set aside for Course in a Box preparation. We do have extra money that's given for online courses in the regular - this year's is a wash, because we didn't have a classroom, so we're just taking - we're thankful, Lord, that we all got paychecks. We were fine with that, so this next year we see what happens with that.

Ed Spann: We have well over a hundred courses online.

Ken: Yeah, it's happening. We're talking music, how do we do these things? You have to know that in theology, languages, all of our Greek and Hebrew studies were on line this year. They are ready to go. You can almost do a complete M-Div degree online. By the way, if were entering seminary right now, knowing what I know on this end, I would be taking a Master of Divinity degree and an Master of Music degree. Obviously, we have that, I think that the others do too, where it's a Master of Divinity with a specialization in church music that is dually accredited, NASM, MATS. Most students look at that and say, "Ninety-two hours? Why would I do that?" Knowing what I do now, I tell every student coming in, "You know, you really need to consider that, because the things you are going to be asked to do in the local church for the future, the ways you are going to be asked to teach, you need to be as prepared as you've every thought you needed to be for those things, and a divinity degree is a wonderful way to go." That's a commercial. I wish I had done the divinity degree now.

Tom Bolton: Our worship degrees, we were asked to submit those to NASM for accreditation after our visit. They had told me after the consultative review that I didn't need to, but after the visit I did. So I went through that process. I haven't heard from them yet. There's enough of a component, because the denominator that they divide by is thirty hours, so it had a high enough percentage of music.

Ken: I'll be curious to see what their response is, because what the visiting team views as music, and what I might view as music... Again, taking with Harold, he just said, "Do that, and when they come through you begin to justify." I'm keeping notes of why we are doing the things we are doing and why we are not choosing to go the pre-NASM route. We did that with our Bachelor of Arts in Music, we did that with the MM changes, like you are supposed to do, but when it came to the MA in Worship Studies, when it didn't have a specific ensemble or performance component, they were electives, I said, you know, if they want to come back afterwards we'll move it to the Christian Education division or the Pastoral Ministries division. We'll still teach it. I don't know. Now, we're a different setup. You are separate school in the administrative structure. We are a graduate division of the graduate school, and so all of our degrees go through the entire faculty, every part of the way. So we don't have an autonomy, and I've written about that with NASM, I had to write about that last time too. That's just the way we are set up at New Orleans. But it may come, but that's 2010 and I'll deal with it then.

Thanks for listening.

Buford: Well, That's our future, and whether we're forced to teach in that way like this faculty was or not, as I said in introducing this, there will probably come a day when I will have to do that perhaps. That was very informative, thank you.

Buford Cox is on the Music Faculty of Baptist College of Florida in Graceville, Florida.

Dr. Ken Gabrielse is on the Music Faculty of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in New Orleans, Louisiana.