The New Learning Center: Current Results and Future Promise

The two-month “shakedown period” for the Wilmette Institute’s new Moodle software is drawing to an end, with impressive results. Moodle has proved to be a very stable and reliable course management system.

Students generally have liked the switch from our old, home-grown system. Faculty have started to use quizzes and various specialized types of forums to direct and organize discussion of study materials. The new course template makes expectations clearer, and the ability of students and faculty to create personal profiles that include pictures of them has made interaction more intimate. There have been minor problems with the new system, but they were traced to the use of an external database.

Registrations have been strong. The four courses offered in February and March enrolled 100 students, which is 28 percent of the Institute’s usual annual registration.

The spring lineup of courses began April 1 with The Promised Day Is Come, a three-month slow reading of Shoghi Effendi’s classic 1941 letter explaining the reasons for the world's present moral and social chaos and providing assurance that the “Hand of Providence” is working to fulfill God’s purpose for humanity. The course includes extensive study materials about the letter that are hard to obtain elsewhere. Faculty include Zaid Lundberg, Duane Troxel, Helen Wilson, and Robert Stockman.

The Writings of the Báb, beginning May 1, provides an opportunity to learn about the revelation of the Báb in order to understand His ministry and the background of Bahá’ulláh’s revelation. In the course students will read most of the major works of the Báb, using both authoritative translations and, in a few cases, provisional translations. Extensive writings by Bahá'ís expert in the writings of the Báb will provide windows into a scripture with which few Bahá'ís have much familiarity. Peter Terry has reorganized the course for the Institute’s new Moodle-powered Learning Center.

May 15 sees the launch of a new course—How to Start a Nonprofit Organization. The course will provide compilations of Bahá'í writings on social and economic development and the importance of expressing the concepts in action. It will also review U.S. laws governing nonprofit organizations. Michael McMullen, professor of sociology at the University of Houston at Clear Lake and lead faculty for the course, often teaches a university course on creating a nonprofit and will be modifying his university course materials to suit the Wilmette Institute’s needs.

June will see two courses. The first day of the month marks the launch of Bahá'u'lláh’s Revelation: A Systematic Survey, a repeat of a venerable course that gets better every time. It is impossible to read all of Bahá'u'lláh’s writings in four months—the duration of the course, which is longer than the Institute’s usual three-month setup—but in that time a learner can read compilations of key passages from each major work and descriptions of their contents and contexts. The course provides a chance to get a sense of the order in which the works were revealed, how they relate to each other, how the themes in Bahá'u'lláh’s revelation evolved over time, and how later works expanded on ideas anticipated in earlier ones. The course is meant to provide a foundation for a lifetime of ongoing study. Faculty include Necati Alkan, Susan Maneck, and Helen Wilson.

Exploring The Tanakh/Christian Old Testament begins on June 15 and represents the expansion of half of an earlier Wilmette Institute course on the Bible. Since the Christian Old Testament was, first and foremost, a Jewish work, the book will be studied primarily as Jewish scripture. The course will look at the literary origin and purpose of the various books as well as consider their relevance to the Bahá'í Faith and their promises of the coming of Bahá'u'lláh and `Abdu'l-Bahá. Faculty include Peter Terry, Hussein Ashchi, and Ted Brownstein.