The Texas Baptist Institute and Seminary (TBIS) is the first seminary — that they know of — that developed a new way of distance education that launched in 2018 not long ahead of COVID. The school has been around since 1948 and is located in the East Texas town of Henderson.
Dr. Robert Wallace, the vice president of advancement of TBIS, says it differs from traditional online classes that require things like discussion boards.
“We just integrated online learning into our regular curriculum. What that means is that if you register for a class, you are registering for the same class as every other student in our school,” Wallace states.
Then, he says, a student chooses their modality.
“You can come and sit in the classroom when the class lecture and discussion is being held. If you can't do that, then we live stream it. It's not just a watching live stream — it's a participate live stream,” Wallace states.
Classes are recorded, he says, for students due to time zone issues and work schedules. Students have a week to watch it and get classwork done.
“We had a missionary in Vanuatu, down in the South Pacific, who was taking classes. He loved joining live, and the reason he loved joining live was because he was an American and he loved the interaction with other Americans,” Wallace states
The problem, however, was that the classes started at one or two in the morning, he says.
“He would do it as much as he could. Sometimes he would have to watch the ‘on demand.’ Then he ended up, during that semester, coming to the states. He ended up in East Texas for a month, and so he just walked into the classroom. When he walked in the classroom, he knew everybody. They all knew him,” Wallace states.
