Competency-based

The goal of learning is to gain competency with a set of skills or area of knowledge. Traditional testing and time-bound terms are not well suited for the acquisition of competencies. Simply put, people acquire new competencies in different ways and at different rates. So course objectives and assessments should be geared around allowing students to demonstrate the desired competencies in their real-life situations. Assignments include real-life applications of the student’s course material. Mentor sessions are when students report on these experiences and demonstrate their current competency. Mentor-professors determine whether students have demonstrated competency with the project objective and should move on to the next project, or whether they need to spend more time building their competency with the current project.

Self-paced

Every course has a self-paced part. Students work through course material (lectures, readings, assignments) at their own pace. When they are ready, they register for a series of seven weekly mentor sessions with a mentor-professor of their choosing. During these sessions, qualified scholars learn the personal strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and temptations for the student and guide them to properly understand and apply the course material in their real-life setting. Having a structured sequence of seven mentor sessions for each course provides a clear path and structure for students to complete courses. The self-paced curriculum is divided into seven groups of five lessons per course (each lesson is approx. 2 hrs of directed work and 1 hr of self-directed study).

Class Size

Redemption Seminary has a new approach to the definition of a “class.” Instead of a set number of students taught by a single instructor (creating a student-teacher ratio), Redemption Seminary has course cohorts, which represent all the students taking a course at the same time and then one-to-one mentoring for each student. The cohort size can be any number, but the student-teacher ratio is always 1:1. This allows students to see and interact with cohort comments from students from all sorts of backgrounds, locations, and contexts while maximizing very personal live interactions with their mentor-professor.

Distributed Mentor Sessions
(Remote or Local Meetings)

Mentor sessions are typically live video chats. However, a student can meet their mentor in local settings when available. This would be a typical scenario when students choose a qualified person within their church or community to be their mentor-professor. For this reason, we prefer the term “distributed education” to “online education.”

Masterclass format

The mentor weekly mentor sessions are only thirty minutes long and very focused. Students have a checklist for each session, so they know exactly what is expected. As is typical with a masterclass, it is time for students to demonstrate their progress and allow the mentor-professor to offer personalized correction and direction.

Recorded and Transcribed Lectures

The lecture hall (traditional classroom) is not an efficient way to deliver information or effectively use meeting time. Listening to a monologue doesn’t require a live meeting. Meeting together in live contexts is the most precious part of education, so we use the masterclass format with live one-to-one mentor sessions. Lectures are significant, so we recorded and transcribed the top scholars teaching in their fields of expertise. This way, your notes can be your commentary and reflections rather than producing a transcription.