In Trust Center
The In Trust Center podcast is hosted by Matt Hufman. Walk alongside theological school leaders and innovators as they explore issues relevant to North American seminaries, all while helping institutions live out their missions more intentionally. Find more at intrust.org/podcast.
In Trust Center
Ep. 98: Creating a virtual neighborhood through an innovative approach to distributed learning
How do you create a community online, particularly among the shifting landscape of theological education? Pacific School of Religion has been working to answer that with Kwaray, an online learning platform that creates a virtual “neighborhood.” PSR President David Vasquez-Levy and Vice President Byron Chung discuss the distributed learning network, created with funding through Lilly Endowment Inc.’s Pathways for Tomorrow Initiative. The platform gives schools and groups a way to create their own communities and join others through an innovative platform that can be “white labeled” for school use. PSR has worked to pair technology with deep community engagement as well as stackable credentials and a “zero-entry” approach that lowers barriers to participation. The discussion also explores how schools use adaptive strategies for the shifting educational landscape. You can find out more at Kwaray here and at PSR’s Kwaray website here.
Hello and welcome to the Interest Center Podcast, where we connect with experts and innovators in theological education around topics important to theological school leaders. Thank you for joining us. Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Good Governance Podcast. I'm Matt Huffman. Lily Endowments Pathways for Tomorrow initiative brought a lot of creativity and innovation into the field of theological education. It's still doing that with new rounds of funding coming. We are recording in um uh the like the second week of November. Um, and I'm joined today uh by the leader, two leaders at the Pacific School of Religion, which has been very creative and innovative. Uh, first, the Reverend Dr. David Vasquez-Levy. Uh, David, welcome back to the podcast. He's the president of the school. Thank you. Matt, it's great to be back with you. Glad, glad to have you. And Byron Chung, who is the vice president of institutional growth. Byron, great to have you on the program. Thank you, Matt. Good to be here. We're going to talk today about uh Quare, which is which came out of one of the pathways for tomorrow's programs. It is, I'm gonna try to describe it, and I'm uh I will probably fail because there's been a lot of innovation. I mean, I think, David, when you and I first started talking about this several years ago, that's a great idea. And and you've been innovative through it. Now, I should mention before uh I ask a question, David started his career in computer science with a bachelor of computer science, his system thinking has done a lot of innovative stuff at PSR and throughout his career, merging theology and and using some of the systemic uh ways of thinking in in computer science through it. And Byron has been himself president of uh the Art Institute of California, uh, which for those of us who are Californians uh or have been know that school, uh, which uh which did some very good, interesting outreach and and certainly uh in in uh technology. And of course, being in the Bay Area, Pacific School of Religion, has tapped into Silicon Valley, has tapped into systems and churches and things that understand the power of technology. So, David, let me start with you. Now that I've kind of rumbled and bumbled my way through this introduction, uh, you know, you've you've melded a lot of things in your time at PSR. Um, but let's talk by just an introduction about what Quarry was, what the vision was, and and how this has developed as an app. Thanks, Matt. Yeah, definitely.
SPEAKER_01:I appreciate that introduction. And uh, you know, we are shaped by the ways we think. And certainly computer science and math, which was my undergrad, shapes my uh my way of viewing the world. Sure. Uh the one book I still keep uh from my undergraduate degree is called How to Solve It by Computers. And it really doesn't have anything to do with any programming but concepts about how we think about uh systems uh transformation. And so that has really served me well. I've also shaped by my own migration experience and the work I do around migration, and particularly with immigrant churches, they tend to be incredibly innovative and creative, right? And so I think for me, and here at PSR, given the makeup of our community, we're based in Berkeley, our student body uh itself has been transformed by many of the educational programs that we have delivered and the realities of how technology has transformed theological education. All of us experience the pandemic and the need for work in place, uh, you know, remote work, uh, for all of us to be able to run our educational programs all of a sudden, exclusively based on technologies that have been transformed. And for us, that has had to be done in many ways on a shoestring, right? We serve a majority people of color community. Our student body is now all over the country, as well as those who are residentially on our campus. And so by necessity, we've had to create, uh engage creatively with technology and see it certainly as a challenge and something to lean into, but also as an opportunity for transformation. Um, many years ago, we started to recognize the desire to really kind of break down these binaries that we often live with about sort of the use of technology or just in-person education. And so have moved into a hybrid model of education. Perhaps because many of us, Byron and I included, are immigrants, we are hybrid identities. We know that, you know, sometimes the best comes from trying to keep afoot in two different worlds. And so when it came to trying to think about how what technologies we were seeing and how we might utilize them, we really started out independently on our own to innovate. We created Ignite Institute with two goals expanding the audience of theological education and transforming the financial model. So that's been our driving force all along. And we have permutated with a wide variety of things and have arrived at these uh platforms that we call QARA, which by the way is a made-up name. We had to come up with a good made-up name that really leans into the idea of queering, you know, quarry and queering, both because it's breaking binaries, queering, and the way that that term is used in queer theory, but also queering in the sense that we are in a search, we are inquisitive, we are trying to learn together. So QARE Discord is this idea of what drives us and how do we utilize technology to be able to reach more people in more affordable ways and allow for a much more distributed platform of learning where participants from a wide range of organizations and communities can both offer content or teaching or materials, but also access it.
SPEAKER_00:But it, you know, when we first talked about it, and then we've taught, as I say, we've talked about it over the years. This is in some ways, it strikes me like Wikipedia and the idea that you know there's access for everybody, and then the best the cream rises to the top kind of thing. Now it's it's more formal than that. Not everybody's getting on, and we understand that. But Byron, I'm interested in your view. I mean, you've had a long career in uh in higher education, you you've worked obviously online and in different platforms. Tell me a little bit about what you're seeing with this, which again, as you know, having been in San Francisco and California, where everything's tech and the tech industry, what is it to you that makes this remarkable?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, thanks, Matt. You know, David and I have have many of these conversations, right, in those early days. And um, even when I first interviewed for the for for the position, we were talking about how do we reimagine theological education, looking at the challenges that schools across America are facing, right? And the schools are uh grappling today with this declining enrollment, and uh instead of just tweaking instead of uh tweaking enrollment strategies, and uh, we step back and begin to ask, and what is the future of theological education going to actually look like? So what so what we saw was a growing number of spiritually curious or mission-driven people who want really kind of a deeper theological uh formation, but couldn't afford a time, money, rigidity, or a traditional seminary degree, right? So the many of these people are bivocational leaders. There are pastors that are perhaps without credentials, community leaders, uh lots of Gen Z as well, right? All hungry for growth, but undisturbed by the current model. So facing this challenge, so we began to reimagine what theological education could look like for them. Shorter, accessible, non-degree programs. So we began really in the process in those early days to break down traditional seminary courses into bite-sizes, right? Into a more spiritually grounded learning experience that is taken into a more accessible, flexible learning format uh using technology. And uh we knew this that we couldn't just dump content into a traditional LMS, right? The formation requires a lot more uh formation, a lot more thinking. So in our research, um thinking about how to do this through technology, we uh in our initial phase, we research about 30 different platform vendors, right? Not a single vendor can deliver what we need. Some deliver one or two things, but not all the things that we need. Something that combines really a flexible learning LMS, a community engagement, credentialing, uh institutional autonomy, yet at the same time being part of a larger community, all in one place. So looking at this, we decided to build our own, right?
SPEAKER_00:And uh using uh a I'm sorry, you just you just sent fear through certain people, right? Or like, because again, we've we we talked about this through the process, and you're like, there's all kinds of LMSs, and you're like, we're gonna build our own. I went, okay. Um yeah, yeah, yeah. So but but again, that community piece is is really, I think, where you saw that.
SPEAKER_02:That's right, that's right. And and this LMS piece is important, right? Because unlike generic LMS systems, most off-the-shelf LMS systems are transactional, right? They they are built for corporate training or academic institutions, but focused on content delivery, not for spiritual formation and community. So our goal really at Quarate is this purpose-built digital platform for theological formation, not just for course delivery, it's for community, kind of what David was talking about. This wide-label, customizable, lay uh learning uh platform designed to help seminaries, churches, faith organizations, and uh at the same time, we're able to bring people together as this large, larger ecosystem.
SPEAKER_00:So yeah, and I think you know, yeah, let me let me ask you a question on that, David, because I don't want to lose this point. I mean, learning management systems were not meant for formation. We talk about I think that's a fair assessment, but and David, I want to I want to ask you, I mean Reverend Doctor, put put on the the theologian the pastoral hat here. We talk about in formation that formation happens in community. You know, and even in the early days of the internet, people, oh, they're communities, and they maybe kind of sort of. And Byron certainly talked about it. Talk to me a little bit about this with formation with Coray.
SPEAKER_01:Well, you know, the first thing maybe to do is to recognize that uh as educational institutions, we have always relied on technology. The most familiar one that we use in all of our brochures are campuses, right? A campus, a building, a classroom, desks, all that uh a whiteboard, all these things are technologies, right? And they're very expensive technologies that we have developed over a long period of time. We sustain, sometimes don't maintain them sufficiently, but we invest in them ongoingly. And many of us build our campuses, right? And we build them in certain ways with a cafeteria, with a chapel, with housing. Over time, the model of theological education as a residential learning community was developed over time with trial and error, figuring out what are the elements that work that are different from being in a church or being only at a university, right? And we created models that over time became familiar to us. In many ways, is a similar process of trying to figure out how digital technologies can also be intentionally designed. One of the courses we include in our Masters of Divinity, because we are in Silicon Valley, is design thinking for social change, right? Everything is designed. And so we knew that this needed to be the case. You're right, we took a deep breath. We resisted creating something, uh, you know, we wanted to buy something off the shelf and in fact ran pilots of the platform on our own on various platforms that we thought could deliver at least 80% of what we needed. But ultimately, one or another challenge came up. Some LMSs, which we're using the term, but it's learning management system, uh, are designed for higher education, like Moodle or Canva. They're great, but they're extremely complicated because they have lots of options and lots of the definitions that mean if you're going to teach a short course that's just four weeks, it takes you longer just to learn to use the system. So we needed a really accessible system that was uh compelling, visually attractive. I mean, our campuses look beautiful for a reason, right? People want to learn in a particular kind of environment. And so digitally, we wanted to reflect the type of community for people to see each other, to see the learn, the learning community and the diversity of the groups that they were partnering with. A challenge we also faced is that many of our campuses, to stick it with that technology, are designed for a single institution. We're learning to share space with others now in many of our campuses, right? Well, the technology had to be designed from the get-go to be a collaborative space. Because our decision early on was not only are we going to create this for ourselves or replicate ourselves online from what we already do in person, but we wanted to do something different. And this is where the Lily Endowment, the Lily Endowment was so significant for us, right? Because they really invested uh like they have been doing in a lot of collaborations and saying, yes, let's work to create something that will allow others to participate. So our goal was that as we are trying to respond to technological changes, rather than replicating 280 seminaries on 280 virtual versions of ourselves, can we imagine a different neighborhood in which many of us are on the same space, the same platform, but we still maintain that in the individual identity and the charisma of our institutions, our theological perspectives, but in a way that we're part of that digital neighborhood, that ecosystem that can contribute to each other. We also wanted to make sure that this was complementary to our graduate program. We're very committed to our outstanding Masters of Divinity program. But we recognize that, as Byron said, that doesn't serve everyone. Not everybody, even many of our denominations no longer require that as the basic certification. So we needed to rise to the needs of the church and prepare other types of programs and content or coursework that is complementary to that. And the way we arrived at that was by an earlier innovation of the idea of a stackable curriculum that begins with a smaller unit, but is always designed with the intent of what's your next step gonna be. And so we needed as our platform not only has that learning management system, it's also built on a CRM or sorry, uh, yeah, no CRM, a customer relations management system. So this is what seminaries use for their admissions process. So the idea is that the platform is designed not only to deliver content, but through the CRM to encourage learners to move along a pathway of formation. And it's a uh it is facilitates the ability of the seminary and the schools that participate to help their learners uh move along that path, uh be exposed to it, you know, communicate with them in a way that allows them to think now that you've completed this program or this or you're we're interested in that, here's something else that you might find interesting.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I love that analogy of this as a neighborhood. Because, you know, most uh learning management systems are it's your school. So if I go to PSR, I'm on PSR school, if I go to another school, it's on theirs, et cetera, et cetera. Here, one of the the powers I think is it can bring a number of schools together. Schools have their ability to interact with the neighborhood, as you said, it it as they will, right? I mean, there's you can come in, you can make it your own, you can you can be part of a broader group. Uh you mentioned the stackable curriculum, which uh again, PSR, I think, has done some incredible work there. So it's not a theological education, isn't an all or nothing proposition. You could start at MDiv and at each step uh you you get some sort of a credential along the way. So there's a there's a whole lot here to talk about. Let's let's get back to Quaré for a second and and talk about what uh because right now, you know, Byron, you mentioned white labeling Quaré. Um and and this is it's a it's a really I have I've been through the demonstrations, I've played around with it a bit. Um it's really a cool system of interacting with like-minded neighbors. I think that's a fair way to put it. Um that the input goes in different ways. People who are part of it can can input. Um, I there's a lot of opportunity in terms of levels of credentialing and all that. Talk a little bit about the the system setup and and what you're seeing when you when you mention white label.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Um the quadrant, there are several capabilities that institutions can imagine for delivery of courses in various modalities, right? There's asynchronous and synchronous course uh delivery. They are they are cohort-based experiences. Um these could be broken down into certificates and micro-credential tracking. We have a system in the back that we can track all of this and learning. And uh there's a custom uh customized home page for each institution, branded home page for each institution. Um there's integrated discussions and resource sharing and messaging tools and um and and and uh you know the idea is that uh when uh David talked a little bit about unstacking is is taking a a traditional if someone would take a traditional uh seminary course, we unstack it into smaller bytes and people can take these in these smaller bytes and earn credentials along the way. And uh and uh ultimately that for some people maybe that's all they need, right? For for some of that. And um and uh and and uh we we do also offer this back end flexibilities, right, for for uh for institutions and partners to add events to to manage registrations and uh and uh collect payments and all of these things are all all available, all part of it.
SPEAKER_00:So on the back end. So there's a full package of ways to engage, David.
SPEAKER_01:That's right. Yeah. Well, you know what I would appreciate, just kind of pressing the metaphors a little bit here as the homeletician in the group. So we talked about a neighborhood, right? Uh is the model that we've been using of this ecosystem that we're in. And uh and that's an intentional shift. We initially, you know, first created the product for ourselves, experimented, then realized this is gonna work best if we go together, if we build together with other seminaries, right? That way we don't have to create every single imaginable course, but we can create some, others can create some, and we can exchange them. So we're in Berkeley. So we started thinking People's Park, everybody comes onto one big, happy open space, and we all put our content out there and it's just gonna be kumbaya. Well, the reality is most of our denominational partners and theological institutions maintain a strong identity and they wanted to have more of a neighborhood where they could have their own space, right? So we did make a significant shift to reorganize our team and our resources to be able to actually help our peers build their homes, build their space on the platform, in which they have what we call a collective. And as Bayern has said, that collective, they have a lot of control over pricing, over what they offer, or what's visible to their users, they can track their users, but at the same time, they're in a neighborhood in which they can pull resources from some of the other ones. They can borrow a little cup of sugar from next door, right? Take a course. We have partners that are already utilizing our design thinking course that's on our platform to bring into their institution. The elements around credentialing is really important. It allows people, as the learner learns, to track their knowledge. When you sign in as an individual, you know, it welcomes you by name. Again, it says a CRM, right? So it knows you've come back. It tells you this is where you're at in your learning, what you completed, what you're in the middle of. And so you can always generate a sort of transcript out of what you've been learning. What's critically important to understand, though, the knowledge that you are developing as a learner and what you're delivering on here, uh, while you determine the level of rigor, you are not getting credit, course, credit on this platform. It is not intended to be an LMS that you would use for a regular graduate level course. Any kind of credit that somebody could gain happens whenever an institution receives what somebody has already learned and assesses it. It keeps the integrity of the faculty's decision at each institution about what they believe is sufficient knowledge to grant credit for something. So the credit is not being awarded. We're just tracking the knowledge, tracking completion. People can take tests, they can complete assessments, they can do all the stuff that you would do in an LMS, but ultimately it generates something that then an institution will receive. In the case of PSR as an example, we have one program that is nine short courses. When somebody completes all of those nine short courses, which are basically based on our thoughts of some of the basic rules of theological education, then people can receive a certificate on the platform for completing those nine courses, right? It's theological education for leadership. Once they complete that, if they want to enter into a degree program at PSR, a one-year graduate certificate, they can be evaluated to receive three credit hours for that content that they deliver, but it's given as an advanced standing. So is does that make sense? So the faculty are still looking at the individual, what they completed, they're learning, and then saying, sure, we'll admit you into a new program with this credit being given to you. But that remains under role of the faculty. And that's important because every faculty then can assess what somebody has learned elsewhere from another collective, from another place, and decide independently whether they would give credit for it or not.
SPEAKER_00:I think the the power of this analogy, and I appreciate it, is if I want to be part of this neighborhood, I build or I, you know, I move into the neighborhood. What I do inside the house is my business, right? But the infrastructure is there. I mean, when I go to the Core A website, I can see who's on the collective, I can see what's offered, I can understand which which places, which businesses, which houses I want to go into. Am I getting that? Is that analogy about right?
SPEAKER_01:To some extent, depending on if you're talking as a user. So most users, most learners are gonna come in not through the quarry broad area, right? You know, that you you would look at quarry as a website primarily if you're an institution trying to build a collective, right? Because that's really focused on the back end. It's almost like people don't go to Moodle or to Canva. You know, people really go to an institution, right? And then that institution happens to use Canva or Moodle. So that's the way to think about it. So Matt Hoffman School of Theology would promote your programs and you would invite people into your house, right? And you have your network of folks and they'll come to your house. Now, when they get there, they'll know that you've got neighbors, right? And you can control to some extent, to a large extent, what else they see in your house, right? Like you can say, hey, you know, my next door neighbor's got this great course that you might be interested in, right? In fact, one of the things you can do, you can license content or courses from another collective. So you could actually invite one of your neighbors to come over and teach a class in your house, right? Does that make sense? You can bring content from another one. So this is the distributed nature of the platform. And part of the reason why it took us a long time to design it right, so that it would allow for this distributed learning in which you have control over your own environment that you're creating and you're being supported to do. Because the white label means we help you build it, we help you train the trainer, we support you in that. And then you can both create your own content, bring the content of others, and individuals can move to other collectives. As they become familiar, the one sign-in form that they did stays with them, even if they go take a course elsewhere or participate in another place. Now, at times that can feel like, okay, I'm gonna lose a user, I'm gonna use a learner, I'm gonna lose somebody that I brought in. Well, you still keep track of who they are and what they've been doing and what they're taking because you brought them in. But it's more akin to what happens in a lot of the best elements of a consortial model, right? In which people, at least at VSR, we find that being part of a consortium uh creates a synergy that allows us to bring more people in and create more interest. And seldom, if ever, do we have students that leave from our group to another institution? It's very minimal when that happens, mostly because people are attracted by what an institution is doing and their particularity, and they do value learning from others.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I mean, I'm gonna date myself a bit. I mean, you remember when MOOCs major online courses were supposed to be the future of higher education, and and they didn't. I mean, it just didn't seem to work that way. But I remember, oh, you'll be able to study math at MIT and you'll be able to, you know, a law course or wherever, it's Stanford University, where wherever. And it didn't happen, I think, because there was uh there were identity issues, there were sharing issues, technology issues, whatever. And and as well, as you mentioned, David, I think the the faculty didn't sign off on that.
SPEAKER_01:Um, yeah, I think that was part of the challenge. And part of the challenge was also completion, you know, online education just by itself, like asynchronous, uh, learn on your own is important, and QARA allows you to offer that, but it also allows you to invite people into a learning community. Because the chat one of the challenges for MOOCs was just that hardly anybody completed them, you know. So so the the the concept of it was that you would be really enthralled and participating in it. They they serve the purpose, right? They really shook uh a lot of the way we think about education and content. And in some ways, we we have to think of those MOOCs or other asynchronous content more as writing a book, right? You create it and then you put it out in the world, and people read it and they make make what they will make of it, right? Well, I think part of people learn differently when somebody reads that book with them.
SPEAKER_00:So well, and that's part of the thing here with Quaret, unlike a MOOC, it this is a place where you're in the same neighborhood, you're getting trusted advice from the place that you went if if the school is sharing. I mean, there's there's more than just an LMS here, there's a collaboration, I would say, where you're you're getting uh the opportunity. I mean, if you're in a collaborative and there's your collaborative says, uh, hey, this course over here at PSR is something to take, you're getting it's it's curated. There's a wisdom in that of sharing, as you said. If you're if your house says uh my neighbor's got a really good thing over here, check it out.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and I think it'd be great, Byron, to to share a little bit about who's on the team, not necessarily by name, but just like the idea of the kinds of support that uh you know, Qiry offers uh uh a new potential partner. You know, if a seminary wants to build a collective, what is the kind of support that we offer uh for that process?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's that's a really good question. You know, with that partner structure, uh, we guide partners through platform setup, content migration or development, course development. We help support with uh course production, post-production, uh even faculty training, curriculum design, and uh cohort planning. So these are all the things particularly for for some of the smaller institutions, right? That that doesn't have the resources. And um we offer this end-to-end partner support, right? And um, so these things are are just really critical for for some of the partners that we've had conversations with, these instructional design, by four training, user onboarding, marketing guidance, and uh um uh you know, so it's it's all part of the the service that we provide for institutions.
SPEAKER_00:So we just had a go ahead, David.
SPEAKER_01:I was just gonna quickly say we just had a meeting last week with a new potential partner who received uh uh recently a grant from Lily to do an educational program that is Is innovative within their organization. And they reached out to us because somebody had recommended that they look at Quare as a as a as a space to share this new program on. And they're not going to do any of the other, they're just going to focus this one program that they developed through this Lily Grant. And the person was just overwhelmed by saying, thank goodness I found you, because, you know, she is a team of three, you know, her. And then she's going to hire a couple more people. Right. And she was trying to figure out, you know, how to go about the process. She knew already that the LMS that their school uses is too cumbersome for what they want to do, too involved, too convoluted, not appealing enough for the kind of audience they're trying to develop. And so she just was really relieved to know that we can provide that support. The way the team works is that we do an initial conversation about what it is you're interested in, what are you looking for, uh, help you sort of think through the structure of what you might need. You know, we have some sub-granting ability that we've been able to use thanks to the Lily Endowments funding that has allowed us to make that more affordable to schools that can't afford it. But we do provide, you know, there's like a basic annual fee that eventually you pay. And the goal is that hopefully you begin to generate some revenue out of your platform that allows you to cover that the cost of the annual uh just technology fee. And then depending on your needs, you know, like Bayer mentioned some things in terms of helping you create a course or produce that course, each of those things, you have flexibility about what you need. Some schools do this well, they already have content, they're ready to go. Then all we're doing is helping them build their platform and guiding them a little bit onto how to get it set up on our platform, and then they run from there on their own, right? The goal is that. The goal is that institutions will become a lot more uh independent in their ability to kind of build uh and continue to keep their content and their courses and their community really thriving. Because if we have a neighborhood with lots of communities moving, that synergy is what ultimately reimagines theological education, but as this more of a broader, thriving environment that is supported oftentimes by in-person and locations around the country from our seminaries, but that creates this collaborative space in the non-degree sector that really creates an a broader engagement with more people, some of whom might find their way into our graduate programs.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So I'm hearing the flexibility of this, I'm hearing the ability as a white label to use this as my own, you know, the Huffman Theological Seminary for the Misguided or whatever it is. And um, um, but more seriously.
SPEAKER_01:I'll donate 10 bucks.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, right. And um I but I'm hearing uh more seriously, I'm hearing the ability uh to to jump in to be able to get this up and running quickly and use this at a number of levels. So talk to me, um, either of you, as if I'm the president or board chair, board member looking at this saying, what is this for me? I mean, because again, I've I've said when I look at this from the outside looking in, I see the potential to collaborate, I see the ability to get on as as uh, you know, with maybe a little less, uh not maybe, but with less of the the onboarding perhaps in other systems. I see something that was designed just for a school of theological education, you know, not like taking no no offense against the other LMSs, but I'm not taking something and fitting it to me. I'm taking something that was written for it, you know, for my field. Talk to me a little more. If I'm a senior leader of a school, what is what is the pitch here that says quarry is really something ought to be thinking about.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I I'll I like to take a some comments on that. And I I think one of the most important things is why does a white label quarry look like, right? And why should they choose Quare? Number one is I think we need to I I urge institutional leaders to think ahead, right? To think about the future of the institution, the future of theological education because uh their students are aging, right? If PSR is an example, I would think that was be very similar across the country. And uh, who are your future learners, right? These are our future who are tech uh digital natives who in their entire lives has been involved in technology. So you must create your education with future learners in mind. So for Quare, what is important is that uh when an institution selects Quare as their platform, they are getting a branded homepage for their learning collective, their own program structure, pricing, and content control. They um they get customized logos and domains and messaging. They can they have full control over their user experience and onboarding pathways. They have they have complete control on the design of their uh certificates, credentials, and degree and uh and uh non-degree programs and how it complements their their uh their degree programs. And uh they offer there's opportunity to offer uh learning spaces for cohorts and uh that leads to certificates and then also administrative access. Their faculty, their back end has administrative access to track learning, uh manage content, and generate the all the report that they need. And it's not just a simple platform. It's it is the institution that really has an opportunity to maintain autonomy over their theological voice and curriculum curriculum decisions and engagement strategies, all while Quarrate provides the digital infrastructure support and uh innovations in the background, right? And this white label idea empowers institutions to uh um show up as themselves in the digital space rather than being buried under another institution's bread or something like that. And um and the and the goal really is to help them to expand their reach to uh a market that they currently are are not marketing to because they're people currently they're only marketing to people who are learning or are interested in traditional degrees, and that's less and less, right? They're more there it helps them expand their market and create an alternative alternative revenue source.
SPEAKER_01:So yeah, I would answer that also by very similarly they'd uh maybe start um you know, our original intent, like I said uh years ago, was we need to expand the audience, broaden the audience, and change the financial model, right? So in broadening the audience, just like Byron said, you know, in as a seminary, you know, the average uh, if you're familiar with you know, the funnel, right? A precedent and a chair of a board are gonna be familiar with this in a in a funnel of admissions. At the top of the funnel, if you have a thousand inquiries of people who think something about what you offer and how you present yourself in the world as a seminary, it's interesting. Less than 50 of them are gonna show up to one of your degrees, right? So that means for 950 people who thought you offered something significant, either the cost of what you offer, the nature of what you offer, the direction of it isn't what they were looking for. And in a traditional model, we have nothing else to offer them, right? So they just walk away. Those thousand people in theological education spend three years in discernment. That's how long it takes from inquiry to admissions in theological schools across ATS. So, what are they doing during those three years? We're mostly pushing information out to them to try to get them convinced to sign up with us as opposed to somewhere else and to do some discernment. Quarry offers an opportunity, even for that market, for that 950 people, an opportunity for you to engage them more meaningfully, delivering some of what they're looking for, perhaps in a much more accessible way, either as a place of discernment, right? Like if I'm considering theological school, it, but I can take a four-week course just to kind of get a sense of it, meet one of your faculty, engage with the community. That's part of that discernment that might lead you down that pathway a little bit better, or at least it leaves you better prepared, right? So it allows you to prepare that. We've designed it so that it doesn't have to compete with your graduate program, but it's repurposing some of the knowledge and content you have in your graduate program in a more uh organized way so that it's accessible to more people and congregations. Uh, for most of us who serve as presidents and board members leadership, we're committed to the mission of the school. Earlier, when we were checking in, Matt, you were talking about the stewardship of the mission and not only the stewardship of the institution, right? Like the mission is the delivery of theological education. This is an opportunity for us to collaborate together to figure out what that looks like. We can do this on our own to some extent. We won't be very successful, right? We have 280 seminaries in ATS, and we are quickly duplicating ourselves into 280 versions of ourselves. That creates a hugely fragmented environment where learners, uh, you know, people in discernment, folks who want to serve their church or their community can find their way in that kind of this, you know, confusing environment. So if we can collaborate and model a collaboration that is distributed, that is still is not everybody doing the exact same thing. We agree, whether you're a partner that is building a platform on with us or a user, a learner, uh uh, you know, somebody who's in discipleship, trying to get formed in this community. Everybody, as they come into the community, are agreeing to a basic covenant that is just about how we learn together, how we grow together, right? And those things are the kind of the neighborhood agreements, right, that help that covenantal agreement to learn together. So I would say it's an opportunity to explore how we can collaboratively expand the audience, reach more people, and then also how do those individuals help to finance that education? You know, uh to deliver a one-year degree of higher education and theological education costs an average of$60,000 to$75,000. Well, we get tuition of about 10,000. So for every student, we have to make up the majority of their educational program. In this uh model, uh, the users, the learners can pay a small amount because it costs less to deliver this kind of education, right? So they're participating more in shaping that education. It may not generate a lot of excess revenue for you to support other programs, although it might, depending on the success of your effort. But at a minimum, it allows you to deliver education where there is more of an even value exchange in which you're giving something of value to them and they are able to participate and contribute to it. You know, and that's really it's the way that it's happened. You know, if you think about any kind of distributed network, whether it's news or movies, media, it's all moved into this direction of distributed networks where various producers of knowledge and content and community are coming together to collaborate. Theological education should lead the way and train our leaders to think about ways to do that, because ultimately our churches also need to find new ways of collaborating with one another to be able to make a difference and create regenerate an ecosystem uh for the well-being of the church.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I think that's a great place to end. I mean, there's there's this Jorah's offering this great array of ways to engage while giving the schools the ability to do that. And I think, David, as you put it, there's a way to collaborate. There's ways to bring people at all levels of the funnel uh for folks who are interested in theological education to engage. And there's this whole neighborhood of collaboration that can be found. I'm gonna put links to Quare and to PSR at intrust.org slash podcast. You'll be able to find that and find more, find ways to connect with them in this uh very innovative and creative Pathways for Tomorrow project. Uh, David Vasquez Levy, the president of Pacific School of Religion, thanks for uh being here today. Byron Chung, Vice President for Institutional Growth. Great to have you both with. Thank you for listening to the Intrust Center's Good Governance Podcast. For more information about this podcast, other episodes, and additional resources, visit intrust.org.