ABSTRACT
Online learning is a highly convenient and relatively inexpensive means of education. The online environment is disembodied without the communicative nuance of facial expression, voice inflection, gesture, and posture. All students participate equally, by virtue of the technology, one of the great benefits of online learning. Online teaching presents multiple challenges to theological educators. Cognitive scientists worry about the attention span of millennial, accustomed as students are to texting, e-mailing, watching short video clips on YouTube, and reading snippets of information on websites, often all at the same time. The technology favors acquisition and regurgitation of information, with some intervening analysis, over against the creative small group problem solving that prevails in most professions. Several of the films explicitly or implicitly critique the assumption that all aspects of life can be assigned a dollar value and that the accumulation of dollars and consumption of things can produce a meaningful life.
