Students divided over online Hebrew course

by Walter Miedema, Contributing Editor

There is a topic of discussion at Calvin Theological Seminary that never fails to spur impassioned responses: the online Hebrew program.

With the program now entering its third year, Kerux contributing editor Walter Miedema spent several weeks talking to students and faculty about the online Hebrew program in order to report how the program was developed and put into place, what the students’ response to it has been, and where the program is going from here.

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Students in the M.Div. and M.T.S. programs must complete a six-credit sequence in Hebrew grammar before being allowed to take the required Old Testament exegetical classes.

Before online Hebrew came into existence, the seminary had offered what was colloquially known as ‘Hebrew boot camp,’ in which students beginning their first year at the seminary would arrive three weeks early and take an intensive series of Hebrew classes during those three weeks. When Professor of Old Testament Michael Williams began teaching several years ago, the three-week program was expanded to four weeks and later six weeks of classes during the summer.

“The biggest objection that students had [to the summer course] was that they had an appreciation for, and realization of, the importance of this, but it was coming at them too fast,” said Williams. “It was like drinking out of a fire hose. In the summer, it was every day of the week they had to be here, and there was no break. If they started falling behind, I could sympathize with them, but the next lesson’s tomorrow.”

Complaints about the pace of the class and how the long program frequently conflicted with summer plans drove Williams to begin looking at alternative methods of instruction.

“I was thinking there really isn’t any reason in this day and age for us to force everyone to learn the same way and at the same speed,” Williams said. “So I decided to put this online in order to make that complaint not valid anymore.”

And thus the online Hebrew program was born. Williams developed much of the online course himself, with some work also being done by student assistants. The course was beta tested for several months before being rolled out to students and being made a requirement in the spring of 2005.

From the very beginning, students’ complaints came frequently and loudly. Some students voiced their opinion that a language such as Hebrew couldn’t be learned online. Others students initially assumed that an online course would be easy, but quickly became frustrated during the summer when they realized how much work was involved in the class.

Scheduling

Not all student feedback on the course has been negative, however. Many students highlighted aspects of the online course experience that they found helpful.

“I appreciated the flexibility and being able to work at my own pace,” said M.Div. student Geoff Van Dragt.

M.Div. student Cornelius Muasa agreed. “One good thing about how the course is set up is that it allows everybody to go at their own pace,” He said.

Students who enroll in the course are given two years to complete it, although they must be finished with the course prior to the end of the first quarter of the year in which they want to begin taking Old Testament exegetical courses, which are offered in the second and third quarters. Most students still choose to work on the class during the summer.

As per Williams’ design of the class, the online structure has a built-in flexibility that allows students to work around other commitments.

“I had to do a cross-cultural internship for the summer, and it was cut right smack dab in the middle of my summer,” said M.Div. student Dominic Palacios. “What I was able to do is go at my own pace at the beginning and get through a lot of it before I went on my internship. I then went on my internship and slowly did some lessons while I could, and got up to a good point before school started.”

M.Div. student Sarah Steen agreed that the flexible nature of the online course was a positive aspect. “Even though online Hebrew required a lot of discipline, I thought the flexibility of my summer was a fair trade off,” Steen said.

Pacing

The flip side of this is benefit, however, is the need for responsibility and dedication to doing the work.

Williams argued that the amount of discipline required for the online course is no different than what was required for the previous summer course. “There was tons of self discipline that was required there too,” he said.

Some students, however, found the responsibility of pacing a six-credit course over the entire summer to be quite difficult.

“Unlike a six-week boot camp, the online Hebrew program hangs over your head for the entire summer and you have no real sense of taking a break from school,” said M.Div. student Meg Jenista. “You come back in the fall exhausted and not prepared for any of your academic work, because you haven’t had a chance to rest.”

M.Div. student David Van Berkel said that he found the weight of the Hebrew schedule to be a burden.

“The whole experience was, for the most part, drudgery motivated by fear of failure, which in turn led to fear of a postponed graduation schedule, which in turn led to mild depression,” Van Berkel said.

Other students saw the course schedule’s mandatory self-discipline as a good thing.

“One good thing that I learned was self-discipline, because no one’s going to make sure you get the lessons done, no one's going to watch out for you,” said M.Div. student Brad Knetch. “You get an e-mail once a month, for about a six-month period, so you have to sit down in the library or somewhere. You have to get this work done. So I learned a lot about self-discipline and how to make a schedule and sticking to it.”

But what is being done for those who struggle with the less-structured nature of the course?

“Because some students are evidently not able to direct their own study in a sufficient way to avoid problems, I am going to implement some directed features,” Williams said. “If students fall below a B-, they are going to be required to meet regularly with a teaching assistant once a week and come to the weekly review class. They will no longer have the option of doing it entirely on their own, because they have demonstrated that that is not working. So there will be more accountability that way from my end.”

Student-teacher interaction

A common complaint from students about the class has been over a perceived lack of student-teacher interaction in the online course. By their very nature, online courses are structurally different from a regular course that meets in a classroom, and many students complained that learning the material online, away from a classroom, was a difficult experience.

Although the course is designed to be able to be taken completely online, Williams protested labeling the course an online course, saying it misappropriates what the class experience is like.

“I don’t like to call this an online course,” Williams said. “That makes it seem like self-study. I like to call it ‘distance facilitated.’ You can do it at a distance if that best fits your needs. You can come in every day and talk with me if that fits your needs. You can have the classroom experience every week if that best fits your needs.”

Williams insisted that in addition to the online material, students have access to a wide variety of resources to facilitate their learning.

“I made myself available,” Williams said. “I still do. They [students] could e-mail me with questions, telephone me with questions, they could stop by and ask questions. If they didn't want to meet with me, if that was intimidating, they could meet with a teaching assistant without going through me at all. They could contact the teaching assistant directly.”

Reviews and tutoring

Williams also pointed out that he offers an optional weekly Hebrew review class for students to attend if they want an in-class component to the course.

“Even through the summer and all through the school year, I offer in-class, once-a-week review sessions. If they would rather sit there in a classroom, if that’s what they need, they can have that too.”

M.Div. student Chelsey Harmon said that she benefited from the weekly reviews.

“I am deeply indebted to the review sessions held each week by Dr. Williams,” Harmon said. “I learned a lot during those times – very practical ways to identify important rules or verbal forms.”

The in-class reviews didn’t work for everyone, however. Some students said did not find the review sessions helpful.

“The review classes I went to in Hebrew were always over my head, and moved along much faster than I could follow,” Van Berkel said. “The result being that I left the few review sessions I attended more frustrated than when I came.”

CTS alumna Brenda Heyink, who was one of the beta testers for the online program and worked as a tutor for the course prior to her graduation in May 2006, said she was confused about why more students didn’t come to tutors for help.

“A lot of people aren’t contacting tutors when they should be,” Heyink said. “I’m not entirely sure why. And a lot of people aren't making use of the weekly Hebrew sessions, which is, in many ways, [not using] an opportunity to learn, because it's not convenient.”

Heyink suggested that students’ willingness to seek additional help outside of the formal structure of the class had a positive effect on their overall performance.

“I looked over the first year’s evaluations,” Heyink said. “It was interesting to see that there was a correlation between what people got out of the course and what they put into it. One’s grade was affected by whether people made use of the resources that were available.”

Some students were unable to connect with tutors, however.

“I emailed all of the tutors, and none of them responded,” said M.Div. student Jeffrey Vandermeer. “Then I talked to the tutors who I knew personally, and they were all too busy.”

Distance issues

Additionally, personal interaction with Williams and the tutors is only available to students who have the ability to physically travel to the Knollcrest campus. Students who participate in “distance facilitated” learning, as Williams said, do not have the same access and must conduct all course communication and learning online or by telephone.

“It’s nice that T.A.’s are available, but my question is, what happens if you don’t live here [in Grand Rapids]?” said M.Div. student Allen Klein Deters. “Fortunately, I was here, but if you don’t live here, that’s a problem.”

Williams countered this point, saying there have been many students who have taken the course from a distance without ever setting foot in the seminary building.

“There was a guy in Detroit with four kids,” Williams said. “He couldn’t come here every day in the summer. What’s he going to do about child care? What about the winter with the roads? This is a nightmare for him. He was able to do this now online. He contacted me many times with questions. There’s a guy in Dallas Seminary who is taking Hebrew here. There’s a guy in Tyndale [Bible College in Toronto] who just completed the course. There’s a guy who did the course entirely from Korea. None of these people could take the course if it were only offered in the classroom.”

Williams estimated that 20% of the students who have taken the course have done so without being in Grand Rapids.

Testing discrepancies

Another student complaint was that the material emphasized in the online course was different than the material that students were responsible for on quizzes and tests.

“What I didn't like was [the course] didn’t emphasize the things that we really needed out of it, in terms of what was most important in the class was offered as extra credit,” said M.Div. student Geoffrey Van Dragt. “So when we get to the final exam, a major focus of the final was something that you’d only understood if you’d done the extra credit, instead of it being a required element of the course. I thought that was unfortunate and a little unfair, because that assumes that you had the time to do the extra credit and that you’ve done it.”

Williams responded that the quizzes and materials only covered material that was in the course and the course textbook.

“I don’t know why it would be a surprise why I should ask something that [the textbook] asked,” Williams said.

However, Williams conceded that preparation of some material could be improved.

“I understand that some [students] aren’t ready for it, so I'm trying to prepare a lot more guided help in doing this,” he said.

Steen, who works for Williams as a tutor, confirmed that she and Williams are working on expanding the online explanation of clausal breakdown and classification, which is one of the issues at the center of the alleged testing discrepancies. Steen said that she and Williams will be adding more questions to quizzes that deal with these issues and that this was in the response to the number of students who had been asking her for help with these issues before taking the final exam.

Textbook

Perhaps the most contentious issue of the entire course surrounds its textbook. Students taking the online Hebrew course are assigned to use the book Introduction to Biblical Hebrew by Thomas O. Lambdin – affectionately known to students simply as ‘Lambdin.’

“I wasn't a big fan of the textbook,” said Van Dragt. “It wasn't very user friendly – especially the smaller version, because the print is small and it's hard to read.”

Van Dragt admitted that the Lambdin text does have redeeming features.

“Now that I'm further on in other classes, there are things that I appreciate about it, like being able to go back and reference,” he said. “I did like that there were short lessons, so that you could do one for a few hours, take the quiz, and move on instead of having long chapters that you had to wade your way through.”

Knetch echoed complaints about the Lambdin text.

“I was at Fuller and Regent [seminaries] and they both use the Burgundy text,” Knetsch said, referring to the textbook Basics of Biblical Hebrew Grammar by Gary D. Pratico and Miles V. Van Pelt, also known to students as the ‘Pratico’ text. “Lambdin [is] a high end language textbook that doesn't communicate to our day and age that doesn't seem passionate about why we're learning Hebrew.”

Knetsch also said that in the Lambdin text, “there is no sense of ownership of what the Hebrew Scriptures mean and why it's so powerful for us.”

Even students who did well in the course had something to say about the flaws in the text.

“I didn't like how Lambdin taught verbs at all because he started off with participles and then went to the finite verbs,” said Palacios. “After lesson 40, not all the verbs are in [the same] form; you need to find the lexical form. The way Lambdin did verbs was very confusing. My verbal vocab is very weak; the way [Lambdin] taught verbs was very difficult.”

“I'd say that the book we use is the biggest downer,” he added.

Some students became so frustrated with the Lambdin text that they purchased the competing Pratico text to have a more straightforward, organized reference. Students who purchased the Pratico text said they found it to be much more accessible than the Lambdin text.

Other minor issues are present with respect to the Lambdin text. The large hardcover text is also expensive and at times the smaller, lime green, paperback edition is hard to read. This is most clearly noticeable when it comes to vowel pointing, which is key to determining the stems and aspects of verbs.

Textbook summaries

Students’ opinions varied about the usefulness of Williams’ summaries of the Lambdin text, which are posted for each lesson in the course.

Deters said he found Williams’ summaries to be helpful “maybe half the time.”

“There were times where you would read the explanations online and then go back to Lambdin, and you still wouldn't understand and so you [would] have to go find somebody,” Deters said.

Other students found the summaries helpful. Knetsch suggested that Williams’ summaries were more useful than the Lambdin text itself.

“I'd say 80% of my studying was on Williams’ [summaries],” Knetsch said. “Williams should have a textbook out. I only looked at Lambdin for vocab.”

Williams said this was a feasible way to approach the course.

“You would not do badly just to study the summaries,” he said. “I'm saying in those summaries, ‘Here is the stuff in Lambdin that is really important.’ I weeded all of that other extraneous material out to give you the stuff that you need to know now.”

Williams was asked about the selection of Lambdin as the text for the online course.

“[Lambdin] was used as a textbook decades before I got here, and when I got here, that's the textbook that I inherited,” he said. “I realize that it doesn't click with everyone. That's why in every lesson I have a folder that contains alternative grammars so that students can see what other textbooks say.”

Williams was also quick to defend Lambdin against student criticisms.

“To point to the text as a stumbling block is really to overlook all these other things that have been provided to help you through that,” he said. “Whatever textbook we go to, there will be those who will clamber for another one; the most recent one. And every year or two, we'd be changing text books. We're going to end up in the same place. All textbooks lead to Rome. You're going to know the Hebrew language at the end, so whatever way you begin your journey is really not important, as long as you make that as easy as possible, and that's what I'm trying to do.”

Changes and technical issues

Nevertheless, significant changes have been made and are underway.

“A lot of what students have said we are acting to implemented into the course,” Williams said. “For example, the clause thing, that is a piece that is going to be added to the course – more parsing of verbs in the quiz questions. So there are going to be more of those are surfacing.”

“We are trying to make the audio and visual components of the course accessible with Macs now as well. There are some problems getting audio and visual together in a program that combines the two and is accessible by Mac, but we’re working on that. We are open [to suggestions], but it can't just be venting. That doesn’t fly.”

Along with improved Mac compatibility, some other glitches have been fixed as well. The online pages containing Hebrew fonts have been changed to picture files so that they are readable by most computers.

There are still some minor technical issues to be worked out. M.Div. student Nate Van Denend said he would like to see the pages reformatted so that they are easier to print off with out having to adjust printer options.

Response to criticisms

Williams made a point of stating a number of times that he was open to suggestions to make the course better. Therefore, I offered a few of the structural suggestions that I had received.

Was splitting the course in half and offering the first half of the course online and the second half in class feasible?

“This completely destroys the whole reason for having the distance facilitated course,” Williams said. “That’s to let students do it at their own speed. All students would have to be at a certain place in the beginning of the fall quarter and they would all have to go at a certain speed in the classroom. Then you’ve eliminated the self-paced and self-directed study component. You might as well have it all in class because you’re not allowing students to have that freedom to chart their own course.”

Could the online course remain an option with the in-class “boot camp” as an alternative?

“That would be all I would do every minute of the day,” Williams said. “I would have to plan courses at a certain speed and a certain structure for the classroom. I would also have to manage and direct all the students online. All the other courses that I teach would have to be taught by somebody else because I would just be overwhelmed by doing nothing but this. That’s just not strategically or logistically possible here. It’s got to be one or the other.”

I informed Williams that some students want to have Hebrew as a regular class during the quarter system. Was this a possibility?

“We [could] expand it out into a quarter system, but that would extend the program for students.”

Evaluations

Williams also said that he has received quite a few negative comments directed towards himself.

“One student sent in one of my evaluations with some horrible remarks on it; just ad hominem stuff,” Williams said. “That wasn't helpful for the course at all. It was just unloading some bile on me. I contacted the student and said, ‘You've said some pretty strong things in your evaluation. Why don’t you stop by and let’s talk about this?’ Now I think that is a Christian response, but the student never got back to me. Now I think that's an unhealthy Christian response.”

The issue arose when I asked Williams about why he has his own class evaluations, which he hands out with each exam. I asked him why these evaluations were not done in an anonymous manner.

“I question the whole practice of evaluations being anonymous,” Williams said. “This is not a healthy Christian practice where we can say sometimes very cutting remarks anonymously to another Christian. If anyone has any difficulty with the course, they are welcome at any time to come and talk with me. I will respond if it is something that I can do. You aren’t anonymous in the church. You’re going to have to deal with conflict and things that you don’t like face to face. That’s the biblical way of doing it anyway. To send in a sheet with all kinds of remarks on it without putting your name on it, I'm not sure that’s the way to go anyway.”

Learning Hebrew

Hebrew is not the easiest of languages for most people to learn. I asked him if he thought this was a major reason he was getting complaints from students.

“I think you’re exactly right,” Williams said. “They think that if people aren’t clicking with it, if it’s scary, if it’s uncomfortable, if it’s obviously going to require a lot of work, then it’s a lot easier to say it’s the course, the way the course is being delivered, [than it is] to look in the mirror. But that has always been the case.”

“There is a certain volume of complaint that you just have to filter out because it will always be there,” he said. “It’s a shame and it's a little frustrating because [online Hebrew] took a lot of work to make possible and it’s requiring a continuing amount of a lot of work to make possible.”

The results

I asked Williams about how students’ success and failure has been affected by the shift from a “boot camp” to an online format.

“This last time that I offered it, not a single person failed.” said Williams. “There were some low grades, but not a single person failed. That is not the case in the classroom. Every year there were three or four people who just crashed and burned. Then they end up hating Hebrew and hating seminary. In the fall if they were trying to rescue their course, they’d have to suck time away from other courses so they would suffer in those courses and it was just a huge problem.”

Remaining discrepancies

Whatever is being done, there seems to be a gap in communication between a significant amount of students and the course staff. I have already mentioned one student’s difficulty in finding a tutor. Another student confided in me that he had sought help at the beginning of the summer, but because all of his potential tutors replied to an e-mail address he didn’t know he had, he was unable to connect with help.

Obviously the “distance facilitated” format is a more tutor-dependent one. It would help if tutors were committed for a certain number of hours each week. It also would help if students, especially those who have difficulty with self-directed study, to see tutoring time as the equivalent of class time for a regular course.

Structures are being put in place to give more structure to those who need it, but ultimately this course needs to be treated as if it were an in-class course in all aspects outside its flexibility. Tutors may need to be encouraged to work at least a minimum number of hours. Students should work at being conscious of the fact that this is a course that time that must be purposely blocked off for and stuck to.

The administration is not exempt from this, either. Until I talked with other students, I was unaware that the credit hours from the course cannot be used as part of a course load for a regular quarter.

“I think if you begin Hebrew in the spring, you should be able to count that toward your credit load,” said Palacios. “If you are taking three classes or ten credits, you should be able to use Hebrew to bump that up to 13 credits. It’s six credits of Hebrew that you kind of just do. You need to be able to count that toward your credit load. I think that's just ridiculous [that you can’t]. I think that's more of an oversight than anything intentional.”

Hopefully this could be remedied, and while it might be a technicality, it is an important change that can allow both for greater flexibility and for better structure.

Looking forward

However the issue of the online course ends up, Williams claimed he is flexible and would go back to the in-class option.

“Teaching it in the classroom is much, much, much less work for me,” Williams said. “It’s much, much, much more work for students.”

But he also believes students, especially those for whom online Hebrew is one of the only courses they have taken, may not realize what they are asking for.

“I know students come here, they have a perspective, and this is one of the first courses,” he said. “They have the perspective of a couple months. They don’t have the perspective of a decade in the classroom. In some sense they have to trust that, yes, we’ve been down this road. There are major problems with the classroom. We’ll go back there if you really want, but then we will not leave there again.”

Much of the ire over this course seem to be directed at Williams himself, and he admitted to being frustrated by it.

“It's a little frustrating, because [the online course] really came in response to the students’ concerns,” he said. “On the other hand, there will always be those who are more than willing to blame whatever system you have, instead of themselves, when things don’t go well. It’s always something out there.”

“I realize that for a lot of the students who write these remarks, this is their first course at the seminary. Perhaps their training or their understanding of pastoral skills has not been developed to the point where it might guide them in the way that they respond to things that are other than what they would like. Unfortunately, I am the one that has to read these remarks. I hope that by the end of their time at the seminary, that they realize that ad hominem attacks against another Christian or just venting, any kind of criticism is much more effective if it also is attended by some positive suggestion. Those are what I'm looking for, and I know it's early in their career for me to be expecting that sort of thing, but that's what I hope for.”

Concluding remarks

It’s true that the course has kinks that need to be worked out, but in my opinion, it is workable. And that’s what we need to do: Work at it together. My hope is that this article will open up some discussion. I believe that the online format does make the course available and usable to the broadest possible cross-section of students.

Let’s work at making it better, not at shutting it down. Let’s do it together, with care and tact.

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