About the school
Introduction
(Following will be revised soon.)
Eighty-five percent of the 14,000 Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox church websites reviewed to date by the editor of the searchable, online International Directory of Church Website Design are poorly designed in the judgment of the editor. Many of these websites still use techniques that were "hot" in the early days of website design ('90s). But website design has evolved rapidly in recent years. Church and parish webmasters, by and large, haven't kept up with the changes.
Part of the reason for this is the small budgets of most churches and parishes (the majority of churches and parishes in America are under 75 members in size) preclude hiring an experienced web designer for a staff position. Instead, they rely on volunteer webmasters. Some of these are educated in web design and interactive media design; most, judging from the evidence, aren't.
Goals
Great Church Websites, Inc., which maintains the International Directory of Church Website Design, proposes therefore to develop and launch an online School for Church Webmasters. (Despite the name, the school would also target parish webmasters.)
The school would provide comprehensive training in graphic design, software use, web design, web development, web programming, designing for accessibility, and web ministry to volunteer (and staff) church webmasters around the country and the world. This training would be offered at a highly affordable cost to students.
As an unaccredited program, it would not be a substitute for formal accredited studies in web design and interactive media design. (In fact, it is hoped that exposure to the studies in this program would lead many students to later pursue formal, accredited studies in the field.) However, it would provide a thorough introduction to a wide variety of topics of importance and value to the church and parish webmaster.
The School for Church Webmasters will offer a Basic Certificate and an Advanced Certificate in Church Webmastering. The two certificate programs of study together would compose seven "tracks" and nearly 70 learning modules.
Each module varies in number of credits. Because the modules will be designed for individualized study, each module will be as long as it needs to be, for the subject matter it covers. There will be no "quarters" or "semesters" of study, per se. Students may enroll in no more than three modules at a time, due to the intensive nature of the modules. Each certificate program must be completed within two years.
E-learning modules offered by the school would be designed according to the ISD (Instructional System Design) process used by instructional designers and educational technologists. They would not be mere "tutorials," examples of which abound on the World Wide Web.
Target audience
The target audience for the school is volunteer church and parish webmasters. Members of this audience typically possess no formal training in web design and interactive media design, but have a lot of passion for web ministry nonetheless. This is evidenced by the fact that they have expended time and effort to make a website for their church or parish in the first place.
Most of these individuals don't own the standard suite of graphic and website design software, e.g., Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, and Dreamweaver. In fact, they probably never will, because they cannot justify spending hundreds of dollars for such software. Thus, for this reason, the school will focus as much as possible on the use of free, open-source software equivalents to the proprietary software that graphic and web designers typically use. As stated, tuition cost to students will be as low as possible, also, for the same reason.