The Bible Online Learner as an Effective and Open Source Biblical Language Learning Environment for Seminaries and Faculties of Theology

On the basis EU funded EuroPLOT project an open-source and open-access web-based platform “Bible Online Learner”/Bible OL (http://bibleol.3bmoodle.dk/) was developed. Bible OL allows for corpus-based teaching and learning of Biblical Languages. In lated 2014 the Eep Talstra Centre for Bible and Coumputer at VU University gave open access to its feature-rich database. Any language instructor can now for the Biblical Hebrew class quickly construct exercises that focus on any chosen linguistic level (alphabet, vocabulary, morphology, phrase analysis [subject, object, predicate, etc.], clause types, clause relations [attributive, adjunctive, etc.]). Nicolai Winther-Nielsen will describe the latest achievements by the Global Learning Initiative (http://global-learning.org/) which supports collaboraton among developers, partners and teachers. He will present three new or updated features are being developed during 2015 in collaboration with programmers Claus Tøndering and Judith Gottschalk. First, the learning outcomes of students are documented in a skill optimizing application called Learning Journey; teachers can monitor the learning curve of students and give informed feedback on performance on regular bases, and students can compete with each other. Second, a new application will help students determine lexical meaning in context. Third, In early 2015 the syntactically analyzed Greek Text of the Global Bible Initiative was implemented for the open source Nestle 1904, and he will invite colleagues to join in the development of new courses for Greek. He emphasize the need to join forces in supporting settings where poverty or persecution restricts language learning and he will invite students to participate in a competition to support global learning. Oliver Glanz will show how the architecture of Bible OL allows to partner with scholars, resaerch teams and institutions to further improve corpus based learning. A good example is the cooperation with shebanq.ancient-data.org (receiver of the Digital Humanity Awards 2014) and Andrews University. Oliver Glanz will demonstrate three major results of this collaboration. First, due to the same database implemented in the query site SHEBANQ and the learning site Bible OL the user can compose very detailed exercises. Second, due to SHEBANQ enabled queries all different verbal classes (e.g. i-nun, iii-he, etc.) were detected and integrated in Bible OL. This allows Hebrew instructors to filter out any verbal class that student are not yet prepared to analyze. At the same time the instructor can select those classes that have been covered in the teachings so far and present them as exercises to students. Third, through the implementation of the Bible OL in several Hebrew courses at Andrews critical data can be generated that allows for measuring learning efficiency. Statistical analyses show that the average student performance has significantly increased through Bible OL. The subjective experience of more than 100 students that joined Bible OL based Hebrew classes supports the statistics. The great majority of students regards the combination of the Bible OL, a corpus-based approach and a Hebrew Reference Grammar as clearly outperforming the pedagogical efficiency of textbook-based, classical teaching methods. A short overview on how the BOL can be integrated in a Hebrew course will given.