The Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion has awarded a grant to Hartford Seminary that will help us better equip faculty for teaching online and in a blended (partly online and partly face-to-face) format.

The $30,000 grant will allow Hartford Seminary to reshape instructional practice by helping faculty learn to use a new Learning Management System. The project will also expose faculty to innovative course design and teaching practices, then give them practice in applying those methods to their own work.

The seminary has recently received approval from the Association of Theological Schools to create a fully online Graduate Certificate in Religious Studies, and in all our degree programs except for the Ph.D., students can take up to 66 percent of their classes online. This grant will allow us to expand our reach to even more students.

The director of this project will be Prof. Brian Clark, who was recently appointed as Hartford Seminary’s inaugural Director of Online Learning.  Prof. Clark, who is also a Faculty Associate in the History of Christianity, is an Instructional Designer who has served in a variety of educational settings and has recently completed an M.Ed. in Instructional Technology Design from the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

This project was made possible by a grant from the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, which is funded by Lilly Endowment Inc. and located at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana.

According to the grant proposal, “The overall goal of the project is to grow Hartford Seminary from an institution that offers online courses to an institution that can confidently offer and evaluate a greater number of courses and can constantly improve the quality of Online and Blended courses and programs.”