Update / Status Report on labiblia.com
Quite a bit of progress has been made in the past few years on a Spanish language online Bible study platform at estudios.labiblia.com managed by Bro. Kevin Hunter. As you will see below, he has put together a group of Brothers and Sisters volunteering from all over the world.
On Facebook, we continue to publish a mix of thoughts from Bro. Casmon Gordon, along with photos with verses, short messages and snippets that point to different types of content on our website such as book, character, and theme studies and first principal overviews. Our mainstay though has been Bro. Steve DeMarco’s thoughts on the daily readings, which he writes three times a week picking highlights from the readings. Our goal with these activities is to connect people back to the main website (labiblia.com) as well as keep an active social media presence which is important for our website.
Sis. Rebeca Binch in Indiana, continues to manage advertising for the various Latin American regions based on requests from tutors, or focus around special events happening in different countries (for example, the recent talks by Bro. Robert Alderson in Bolivia and Chile). We increase/decrease advertising based on the requests from the different areas, for instance, we have slowed in El Salvador for a bit to allow Sis. Silvia Fernandez to catch up on her students but increased in Costa Rica, now that several members of the Santa Barbara de Heredia ecclesia have joined the team. Sis. Marie Cooper in Seattle, is working on Argentina; Siss. Pati & Beti Vasquez in San Salvadore, are taking care of students in Uruguay/Paraguay/Chile; Sis. Nishla Neblett in Panama, Sis. Zully in Guatemala, look after their students; and Sis. Marcela covers her country as well as helping with Nicaragua along with Sis. Sandra, etc.
Another activity that we are hoping to expand is online talks. Beti and Pati Vasquez recently organized a Zoom talk led by Bro. Rene Castillo, for their students in Uruguay/Paraguay/Chile. They had at least 8 attendees who were quite engaged and asked many questions. Through this first event, we also learned how to manage those events a little better. Bro. Diego is organizing a team to start delivering regular talks. The Costa Rican ecclesia has had an active social media presence for many years, regularly releasing short video recordings on Facebook.
Bro. Jason Grant, who leads our website development, is currently working with Siss. Rebeca and Jean Hunter to create a custom landing page for Southern California that requests mailing information, as Jean is still able to manage postal course students in this area. For other areas, receiving the lessons by mail is still an option (tutors may propose it where it seems useful), and these are sent by Bro. Larry & Sis. Marie Cooper.
As some may know, when we initially built the online courses, we created all new multiple-choice questions for the first course to allow students to advance quickly without bottlenecking on tutor availability. Recently, Sis. Damaris Cueva has been working with Sis. Silvia as well as Siss. Katharine and Ambar Jimenez to revamp the questions to include more references to specific Bible verses. Bro. Jason Grant is working on adding a way to have open-ended/short answer questions as well, for it was found that multiple choice doesn’t provide enough material for the tutors to really know what the students are thinking and engage them in conversations.
Siss. Damaris and Silvia are also working on restructuring the first 22 lesson course to follow the order of the Bible (e.g. start in Genesis and work forward) rather than the current traditional structure. Sis. Ambar Jimenez is their ‘technical’ expert who will work on publishing that when it’s done. Sis. Kathy is starting to work on converting the Matthew/NT course to our online format, to be like the OT course.
To follow the Matthew course, we have secured permission from the CSSA in Australia to translate the senior notes for their SS lessons on the book of Acts, and then modify them for use with online studies. Sis. Sara Alvarado has begun translating the first set of lessons.
Bro. Jason Grant and his team continue to work on system improvements for us. We have some challenges with the WhatsApp integration to the system in that if we have too many messages of the same kinds too quickly (for example, Beti and Pati sent hundreds of invitations to the online zoom talk they held, or if we have successful advertising campaigns and send out too many welcome messages) our WhatsApp number get shut down. Sis. Marcela manages the account and has worked through a few technical challenges there, but Bro. Jason and his team are working on creating a new messaging system that won’t fully rely on WhatsApp.
As we gain experience in optimizing our online presence, we are finding that the number of registrants (currently approaching 20,000) has far outstripped the capabilities of the relatively small number of tutors that the Central and South American ecclesias can field. Recently Sisters Joanne Gould and Kay Collister have agreed to try their hand at helping Sis. Marie Cooper with managing students in Argentina, and we have also had several thisisyourbible.com tutors volunteer to help in other areas. Currently English-speaking tutors are reliant on online translation tools to communicate with the students, but Jason’s team is also working on an embedded messaging system in our online platform that will enable real time translation of messages.
Our community has been working in Latin America for more than 60 years now, but in some ways, it feels like we are barely getting started. As you can hopefully see, from what we have shared here, there are many different opportunities for brothers and sisters to get involved. Look above at the international team now working to help spread the message of the Truth to Latin America. As noted above, Spanish language proficiency is not required to share in this exciting work. If you would like to help, please contact Bro. Dennis Paggi at chairman@cbma.net.