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“More and more Christian schools I know through connections, if they’re not already doing [online education], they’re talking about it,” says Shoe, the Mid-America enrollment executive. “And the market’s demanding it.”
The combination of America’s religious character, its large and well-organized evangelical population, its sophisticated online education market, and the big-tent approach to Christian education taken by many of its faith-based universities has set the stage for rapid expansion of Christian-oriented distance learning, says Garrett, whose firm has worked with universities such as Liberty and Mid-America on their online strategies.
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“I think that evangelicals tend, very often, to look at numbers as being important,” Campo says. Being able to increase the number of Christian-educated graduates in the world via the scale afforded by online education, he says, is cause for enthusiasm in many evangelical circles.
But to what degree can a Christian university actually foster the same religious character in its online students as it can in its residential students?
The task is not as daunting as it was even five years ago, says Kathy Player, the president of Grand Canyon University. “Nowadays, with technology, you can bring in so much of what you do [on campus],” she says. For example, Grand Canyon offers its online students Bible study sessions with a chaplain through its learning-management system.
It also streams its chapel services, as do many similar institutions. They also often pepper their learning portals with inspirational passages from scripture, and provide channels for online students to submit prayer requests from their fellow students. Institutions that require faculty to sign a statement of faith and instruct them to teach various subjects through the prism of Christianity tend to require the same of their online instructors. Regent University offers special training to its online faculty on how to replicate a Christianity-flavored course in an online environment.