Online LDS religion courses


SpiritDragon
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I was just talking over some things that would be kind of neat with my wife and we thought it would be great to have online courses perhaps institute-like or sunday-school-like on a range of topics. In particular it would be nice to have a well organized start to finish family history work tutorial covering where to start and what to do. It might also be a great way to cover some thorny topics of church history in a faith-promoting context helping people gain exposure to potentially damaging information in a safer environment and get really good doctrinal foundation and maybe some official church statements (or a clear pronouncement of no statement) on topics. I suppose in a way the church essays kind of do this, but I think it'd be cool if they were part of some over-arching curriculum.

What do you think? Would it be neat to dig in to to guided online courses on various church topics not typically covered in great detail in Sunday meetings? What topics would you like to see? What format do you feel would be best suited to such (i.e. video and text lectures and lessons, podcasts, interactive discussion forums, wikis?) Does something like this already exist? If so, can anyone enroll?

I'd love to see topics such as:

Family History Work start to finish

Church history and race relations

Possibly Book of Mormon Geography: No official position? latest evidence to support divergent theories.

Access to seminary and institute curricula complete with interactive lessons.

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5 hours ago, MarginOfError said:

It isn't far off. We already have online Seminary. My stake is piloting online Institute right now.

That's exciting news. I'm looking forward to hearing more. Hopefully it is available to old-timers like me and not just those under 30. But, even that would be an exciting step.

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5 hours ago, KScience said:

Online Institute would be rather fab!!  Where do you get online seminary??

 

 

 

4 hours ago, MarginOfError said:

I'm not entirely sure.  It was just an option for our stake this year.  We have several families that live too far away to make it in for early morning seminary.  It's possible that's also a pilot as well.

We have it too.  Online seminary is out of pilot already.  But it is only available to stakes and branches with distance challenges and have high-speed internet capability with economic conditions that allow each student to access the internet without additional burden.  It doesn't replace regular seminary - it still has to be available even when online seminary is offered in the stake.

Set-up is - you get a Seminary teacher assigned from the Stake (different teacher from the regular seminary class).  The class gets assigned reading and online work for 4 days of the week and then they meet face-to-face as a class (can be web conference) one day a week.

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12 hours ago, SpiritDragon said:

I was just talking over some things that would be kind of neat with my wife and we thought it would be great to have online courses perhaps institute-like or sunday-school-like on a range of topics. In particular it would be nice to have a well organized start to finish family history work tutorial covering where to start and what to do. It might also be a great way to cover some thorny topics of church history in a faith-promoting context helping people gain exposure to potentially damaging information in a safer environment and get really good doctrinal foundation and maybe some official church statements (or a clear pronouncement of no statement) on topics. I suppose in a way the church essays kind of do this, but I think it'd be cool if they were part of some over-arching curriculum.

What do you think? Would it be neat to dig in to to guided online courses on various church topics not typically covered in great detail in Sunday meetings? What topics would you like to see? What format do you feel would be best suited to such (i.e. video and text lectures and lessons, podcasts, interactive discussion forums, wikis?) Does something like this already exist? If so, can anyone enroll?

I'd love to see topics such as:

Family History Work start to finish

Church history and race relations

Possibly Book of Mormon Geography: No official position? latest evidence to support divergent theories.

Access to seminary and institute curricula complete with interactive lessons.

You can do this all on your own through the gospel library. There are dozens of manuals for all sorts of topics as well as the new Saints book.

None of this will spoon feed you things like institute or seminary will, but all my religious knowledge and understanding comes from these manuals and from BYU speeches. But seriously, the Saints, Mormon Enigma, Rough Stone Rolling, comprehensive church history, church history and many of the biographies have everything we would ever want. A seminary or institute class would only cover the basics we already know.

As far as the geography, I don’t think the church will ever make a claim or suggest a an area where the book of Mormon took place. You can get that sort of evidence from Fair Mormon or Book of Mormon Central.

Family history is a difficult one because when it comes down to it... the only way to understand how to do it is to just dive in and figure it out. Everyone’s family line is unique to them and what works for someone wont work for another. I’ve been to dozens of genealogy classes and firesides and none of them helped me with my family history work. They were mostly pump ups and testimonies. I can find 10+ names in an hour of searching and my ability to do that came from probably 50+ hours of just fumbling around trying to figure it out. My tactic only works with family lines that are saturated with Latter-day Saints.

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4 hours ago, Fether said:

You can do this all on your own through the gospel library. There are dozens of manuals for all sorts of topics as well as the new Saints book.

None of this will spoon feed you things like institute or seminary will, but all my religious knowledge and understanding comes from these manuals and from BYU speeches. But seriously, the Saints, Mormon Enigma, Rough Stone Rolling, comprehensive church history, church history and many of the biographies have everything we would ever want. A seminary or institute class would only cover the basics we already know.

As far as the geography, I don’t think the church will ever make a claim or suggest a an area where the book of Mormon took place. You can get that sort of evidence from Fair Mormon or Book of Mormon Central.

Family history is a difficult one because when it comes down to it... the only way to understand how to do it is to just dive in and figure it out. Everyone’s family line is unique to them and what works for someone wont work for another. I’ve been to dozens of genealogy classes and firesides and none of them helped me with my family history work. They were mostly pump ups and testimonies. I can find 10+ names in an hour of searching and my ability to do that came from probably 50+ hours of just fumbling around trying to figure it out. My tactic only works with family lines that are saturated with Latter-day Saints.

Thanks, Fether. I'm well aware that there's plenty of information out there already and wouldn't even suspect anything new or earth-shattering really. Just that my wife and I were talking, as I said, and we thought it sounded like a cool idea. Surely, there is a way to take some of the learning curve out of family history work. That being said I suspect some fumbling around to be a given in acquiring any new skill.

I thought that perhaps others would have some areas of interest or ideas in how it should be implemented and so on.

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Remembered a couple more fh resources:
https://www.thefhguide.com (presents the information in a logical way building on each skill as you) https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Riverton_FamilySearch_Library/Handouts_and_Guides

 

 

Edited by Manners Matter
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