The School of Religion is expanding its online graduate course catalog over the next two to three years, according to Religion Graduate Program Coordinator Alan Parker. This semester, the department offered its first online graduate course called Studies in the Psalms. In the 2020 fall semester, it will offer two new online courses: God and Human Suffering and Studies in Revelation.
“Every semester, we are going to be adding two classes,” Parker said. “Within two or three years, we will be offering six classes in a semester. That’s the goal we’re moving towards, but we’re pacing ourselves by just doing two a semester.”
According to Parker, graduate courses were only offered as two-week summer intensives prior to this semester. Because of this schedule, MA Religion students traditionally took six years to complete their degree. If this online expansion succeeds, MA Religion students could potentially finish their degree in two school years and three summers.
“Our goal is to create an affordable, convenient, substantive option for those who wish to pursue graduate studies in religion and to expand this beyond the Southern Union so that we can offer something worldwide through a combination of online options and summer intensives,” Parker said.
The School of Religion is also exploring ways to offer this program in different languages. In conjunction with Online Campus, they are currently contacting sister universities to collaborate on religion classes taught in Spanish and Portuguese.
“We’re very excited that the School of Religion is embracing and opening themselves to this new idea of online education,” said Director of Online Learning and Academic Technology Gus Martin. “We, as an institution, are in a perfect position to expand and grow online and make courses [and degrees] available that we currently do not have. We do have the faculty, and we do have the resources available. It’s exciting times.”
According to Parker, there were only 12 students enrolled in the religion graduate program two years ago. That number has more than quadrupled to 49 students today.
“Our goal would really be to get up to 60-70 students, which I think is feasible,” Parker said. “Particularly, if we go online, I think if we can do online multilingual, we can get hundreds of students.”
Comments