Whether you’re building a bridge, assembling scaffolding, or mounting the wings on an airplane, you need nuts and bolts–small but important elements that hold the whole thing together. You usually don’t see them, but they’re crucial to the building’s strength and purpose. My work with eDOT is nuts and bolts—helping to develop graphics to create appeal within the online courses and formatting the text to compose an easy-to-follow structure within the course.
Currently I’m involved in adjusting these “nuts and bolts” for a Biblical Preaching course. That has involved creating colorful graphics and charts to help explain an abstract concept, such as this:
I will also spend hours adjusting the “nuts and bolts” of the course text using these standardized formats:
The student may never realize that we worked hard to give the course both color and consistency, yet we think it is an important element to making the material interesting to the student and to facilitate his learning.
I’ll admit that sometimes I wonder whether these behind-the-scenes aspects of online course development really matter. After all, I don’t hear that the students really liked the consistency of the course layout or that the creative graphic helped them to remember the concept they studied. As I pondered this one day, I was impacted by the statement in a Bible study I was reading*: “Every one of us who embraces the glory of God as our purpose will end up doing great things precisely because we do God-things. His holy hand resting on the least act renders the ordinary extraordinary. Spooning soup into the mouth of the weak or manning the nursery so a tired mom can go to church are acts of high worship when offered in the name of Christ. He beholds the sight like a breathtaking work of art, tilting His head to study each subtle detail.” I am challenged anew to do my work “as until Him.” And as you read this, I trust that you, too, will be encouraged to do your part in building God’s kingdom. One seemingly small thing you can do is to pray for us. Pray that our work will be bear fruit that remains and that God will be glorified through all that we do in eDOT.
*Esther, It’s Tough Being a Woman, by Beth Moore, LifeWay Press, Nashville, TN, 2008, p. 173
