This course, composed of 7 lessons, is offered over one semester. Each lesson covers a 15-day period of individual work by the students. They receive all the work documents at the beginning of each period and, in accordance with the principles of distance learning, are then free to organize their work time as they wish. To punctuate these different periods, each lesson is punctuated by an assignment, the validation of which determines the continuation of the course.
The Moodle space available to students is organized by lesson. Each section has an editorial presenting the subject of the lesson, the documents available and the work to be done at the end of the lesson. The theoretical documents offered to students are for the most part documents written by the teaching team, supported by introductory manuals which are highly recommended.
At the end of each lesson, students are required to complete an intermediate assignment which may take the form of a quiz, a written assignment or an audio/video presentation. The quizzes, sometimes visual, do not have a time limit, but students must reach a 75% correct answer rate after a maximum of 3 attempts to validate them. They are designed so that the answers to some of the questions are not found in the course, but require consultation of textbooks and other resources. Once the assignment has been validated, feedback is displayed under each question to supplement students' knowledge. The written assignments ask students to answer 5 open-ended questions in a maximum of 2-3 pages. These are presented in the editorial at the beginning of the lesson. Teachers grade each assignment, following up with modifications and comments to provide students with complete feedback. Students must receive a "passed" grade; if they fail, they are asked to complete an additional assignment for the following week.
For the first time this year, during lesson 6, the teaching team offered students the opportunity to record a 10-minute oral presentation on a topic chosen from a list presented in the editorial of the corresponding lesson. This format allows students to prepare for the oral exam format, to get used to a presentation on a given topic in a few minutes and to receive feedback on the content as well as on the form of their presentation. Until June 2020, the final exam consisted of a 20-minute oral presentation on the introductory course material and additional readings. Students were given 20 minutes of preparation time and an unannotated Bible to answer one of two questions. Until then, students who lived too far away to come to Geneva had the option of taking the exam remotely at an official institution (embassy, consulate, institution of higher learning). Examination formulas that allow students to take the exams from home have recently been developed.
In order to alleviate the main difficulty that arises during distance learning, namely the isolation of students, the teaching team has put in place several mechanisms. On the one hand, it proposes, following lesson 4, a day of face-to-face meetings. The objectives of this session are to get to know each other, to answer the students' questions, to review together the different points of the first lessons and to discover new aspects of the New Testament. On the other hand, between lesson 5 and 6, students have the possibility to request an individual telephone interview (with or without camera) with the teaching team. This meeting allows us to review the lesson with the students and to answer their questions.