Its hard to believe that we have been Online for 9 months now.  There has been a lot to do and there still is a lot to do but we are all very happy in the Online department.  We get lots of encouragement from our students.  Just this morning someone finishing the Basic Preaching Skills module wrote in to tell us that they doubted their preaching abilities before starting the module but now are so eager to be given their next opportunity.  We have been building up a great relationship with a College in Nazareth which is using our Online modules.  Tomorrow Peter Stevenson and myself fly out to Nazareth for a few days to meet the staff out there.  We are looking forward to it so much.  An update no doubt will be posted on our return.  In the meantime the Online department will be efficiently run by Emma George who will help you in any way she can!  Bye for now...

Good to hear from you Andy. I have just spent the afternoon studying unit 2 of module 1 and I realise what you mean about the lack of interaction with the Tutor. I suppose that is what the Journal is for, although it is odd to be putting down your thoughts, knowing that they will not be read until you submit them when you have finished the module. I find myself having to be very clear in what I write, as I want to get over what I am thinking. In a normal lecture situation the one-to-one interaction would enable you to do that much more easily. Oh well, I suppose it will just take a bit of getting used to, but it is at least teaching me to be more concise when trying to express a point! Rob

Hi Everybody,

I have just signed up for Spurgeon's Online and am really looking forward to getting into the course. It would be good to hear from other people out there. Just a little bit about myself....Aged 49, married with two children (one of each). I have thought about doing some sort of formal theology study for many years but only just gotten around to it (after prompting from my lovely wife). "Retired" from full-time work a few years ago so now I have more time on my hands to study (famous last words!). Very actively involved in teaching and preaching ministry anyway, so thought why not introduce more structure into my studies by following a set course like this one. When choosing a college, it just had to be Spurgeon's. Great man of God and he was originally a "local man" (he was baptised in the river at Soham, not far from where I live).

Anyway, I look froward to hearing from some of you.

Yes we have been live and online for nearly 5 months.  We have learnt so much and enjoyed the provisions that the Online site offers.   The student forum has been a particular highlight.  Since the launch of Spurgeon's Online we have had over 10,433 visits to ths site from 79 countries (over 3000 unique visitors).  Now we need to transfer visitors into student numbers.  The best advertisers for Spurgeon's Online are our students - who we hope are satisified customers!  Now we have sorted out most of the inital expected teething problems we are ready to welcome new students with confidence.  The feedback from our students provides us with the incentive to keep this labour demanding service on the web.  It has been good to hear about churches organising study groups to use our online modules and also to hear of people studying throughout the world.  We hope and pray that the site and the training it offers will he ...

It is just over one month since we launched Spurgeon's Online.  The response has been so encouraging. Many of our "Open Learning" students chose to transfer to Online study and have been very positive about the benefits.  There has been interest from all over the world and many new students have enrolled.  It is particularly good to see how enthusiastically students are using the Forum facilities.  At last there is a real sense of community among our students who are studying at a distance from the College.  We hope a good number will turn up for the Study Days in May so that that sense of community can be nurtured further.  Our first students were very patient as we ironed out a few techinical issues and we are making improvements all the time as we receive feedback from students.  Our technical team, our Office staff, our finance department and, of course, Rachel Gill and Paul Scott-Evans, have been absolutely great an ...

I'm pleased to say that I'm still following the course.  I wasn't really sure whether I'd have the determination to keep going but I'm about 1/3rd of the way through the first module.

It's not been easy (at times) with full-time job, 3 children & various church responsibilities but I'm still managing to make good use of my commuting time. There are some days when my brain just hurts too much after work to spend time on the study.  So I just take it easy and remind myself that it's not a race.

I do pretty much all the studying using my Palm TX pda.  It's much easier that using a laptop on the train and it has a bible and web-browser.  I save the web-pages on the PDA for each unit so I can work off-line.  The journal is done using a Pocket Word application which I syncronise with my PC each night (in case I lose my PDA). 

Till next month.....

All is going well so far.  I'm learning a lot and enjoying the challenge.

The website is working well and the material is split up into small chunks which make it easy for me to complete some sections on my daily train journey.

I just completed the registration process which was fairly easy.  

I had some irritations with PayPal.  It seems that PayPal detects that I'm living in Holland and presents me with the Dutch language PayPal site and Dutch payment options which differ from the UK.   I figured out how to get the PayPal site into English and then was able to register a credit card.  This registration process took a week to complete because in order to register a cred card with paypal you need to make a £1 payment and wait for the transaction to appear on your credit card statement.  You then need to enter a code which appears next to the transaction description to complete registration of the credit card. 

I really happy with the online study notes and the website.