 Frequently
Asked Questions
The list of FAQ's is shown to the left, with the related questions and answers
shown below. Scroll down the page to view questions and answers, or click
on the question of interest in the list on the left.
Q: What is EduPlex, exactly?
A: EduPlex Ministries is a 501(c)3 tax-exempt non-profit education ministry.
Our goal is to provide high quality, multimedia rich, interactive
relational education with life coaching or mentoring worldwide via the internet.
For developing world students, the material is free, and usually delivered on optical
media. Course authoring is also free. A very powerful and easy-to-use
authoring system is built into the EduPlex system. More information is available
on our
About Us
page, and in our
multimedai presentation.
Q: What is Relational Education?
A: Relational education is based on the simple principle that
retention and life application of material, which leads to character and
spiritual formation, is best achieved when the student is drawn into meaningful
relationships with other students and a small group facilitator during the educational process. The student experiences the
course through a series of key planned interactions with other students and the
mentor via our unique and powerful video conferencing system. Student/student and student/mentor interactions are also
supported
via our messaging and social network system.
Q: How is EduPlex different from other online education systems?
A: There are many features that set EduPlex apart from the typical online education
system. We will discuss only a few here.
EduPlex has a unique model to support non-profit and small organizations.
The key word here is FREE. There is absolutely no charge to create and offer
courses on our system. Authoring is much easier on our easy-to-use system
than other systems.
You do not need to be a technical guru to use our authoring system.
Even multimedia is easy: we do all the work for you
for free to convert your audio and video files to multiple streaming
video files to support both dial-up and broadband student connections.
Take a test drive! Take
our new course Introduction to the EduPlex Courseware Platform
and create a sample course yourself! We provide all of the content, and give
you step-by-step instructions. When you complete the course, you will have a
fully functional course about education on the internet, and a deep
understanding of many of the features of our authoring system.
EduPlex is also unique in that it provides an avenue for an organization to expand
its reach and increase impact both in the devleoped world and via our extensive
outreach efforts in the developing world through our distributing partners. Our
goal is to change the culture via character and spiritual formation, and close the training and education gap in the developing world.
Relational education with a personal success facilitator is a unique offering from EduPlex. We believe in transformational
education: education that not only instructs the mind, but changes the heart. OUr mission is to create positive cultural
change worldwide with courses that facilitate character and spiritual formation.
We provide a unique set of tools to make this a reality in an online environment.
Our partnership program is very unique. We provide many outlets for your courses,
and opportunities for selling courses from other authors. In effect, we offer
you a free and very effective course marketing program.
We also provide
multiple partnership options,
from supporting you doing all of the
work yourself all the way to us creating the entire coruse and coaching plan for
you with our in-house courseware development team.
Finally, there are many features and functions of the EduPlex system that make it
the state-of-the-art in education. If you want to know more, ask for a demonstration
of the system, consider taking the course Introduction to the EduPlex Courseware
Platform described above.
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Q: How do I take a free course?
A: Follow this simple process:
- Click on course catalog in the menu bar, and then click on the
Free Courses link in the left column.
-
Select a free course from the Free Course Catalog list, and click on the course
title. This will display
the Course Details page.
- Click on the Buy Now link. Even though this is a free course, you
will still go through the standard process used for all courses.
- Follow the step-by-step process to set up a new account (if you don't already have
one) or
log in. Then view the shopping cart, and click on the checkout
button. You will land back at the my courses page, where your new course
is listed in the Current Courses list. If you just created a new account, you will find yourself on the Create New Profile page instead. Fill it out, submit
the information, and then go to the my courses page using the menu
bar.
- Click on the course title to go to the course home page. You will have access
to the Student Orientation course from that page, which you should view first.
Then, use the Course Action Menu to view the course itself.
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Q: How can I partner with EduPlex Ministries?
A: There are a number of ways you can partner with us:
- Prayer Partner: Our ministry depends heavily on prayer.
We need God's wisdom, His provision, and His blessings. Sign up for our
newsletter
to keep informed about our prayer needs.
- Financial Partner: EduPlex depends on people like you who
believe God wants them to help make this ministry possible. Your funds will
be used to increase our course offerings and generate course libraries to be delivered
to the developing world via our international ministry distribution partners. In addition,
a portion of the receipts for every course you purchase goes to the ministry. We offer the
ability for our financial partners to
donate online.
- Talent Partner: EduPlex has a number of functions available
to people to help the ministry using their talents and time. Contact us if
you are interested in volunteering.
- Reseller Partner: if you have an organization that could
benefit from selling EduPlex courses on your website, we offer a relationship where
you receive a commission for every course you sell on your site. This will
financially benefit your organization as well as EduPlex.
- Authoring Partner: if you have material that can be converted
to one or more online courses, we provide you with the tools to create the course
and promote it at no charge to you. Courses are sold in the developed world,
and given away to certified students and ministries in the developing world.
When a course is sold, a portion of the receipts are shared with EduPlex and
the reseller. If you sell the course on your site, you get the reseller fee
as well as your normal income from the sale. If you want some assistance for
course development, or would like us to develop the course for you, we have
multiple partnership options
for your consideration.
- Distributing Partner: if you represent a developing world
ministry, and would like to be able to provide course libraries to ministries, churches
and organizations in the areas that you work, please contact us.
- Courseware Development Partner: Authoring partners can additionally
partner at a higher level with EduPlex. This is a valuable approach if you
would like help creating your course. There are a number of levels of this
type of
partnership available.
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Q: What type of organizations can be Resellers?
A: Any organization that is interested in supporting the effort for positive cultural
change is a candidate. Probably the most common types of organizations are Christian ministries, such
as churches, church schools, seminaries, and colleges. However, any organization that wants
to offer high-quality, high-impact, interactive online education to its constituency but is not in a
position to create courses would fall into this category. Of course if you
have material that could be formatted as a course, we encourage you to consider becoming an Authoring
Partner instead.
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Q: What kind of courses are you looking for?
A: Naturally, we are looking for material that will assist our efforts for positive
cultural change. This includes leadership
training, Biblical studies, spiritual growth and Christian maturity, etc. We are also looking for material in virtually all areas that will have a positive effect in the world. The only
limitation we place on course content is that it not conflict or undermine our
Statement of Faith. Thus, most secular material, such as mathmatics or physics are certainly
welcome. For developing world students, even courses on how to set up a small
business would be very useful. We are very interested in the home schooling market, as well as supporting various
porfessional organizations by providing CEU's required for certification, such as
ACSI. We plan to have a wide selection of courses
from many different categories and fields to offer our students.
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Q: What exactly is a Private Label website?
A private label site is a site that will appear to be part of the partner's main
website. It will share a common logo in the page header, and a compatible
color scheme. The private label itself is hosted on our servers, and provides
all of the functions required to offer courses for sale, including e-commerce, and
to present the course to the student, including video conference interaction with the course coach, if the course offers that option.
The private label site is accessed via a link or
button on the partner's main website, using a special code we provide. Want
to see an example of a private label? Check out
Sacred Saga Ministries. Note that clicking
on "home" in the menu will bring you back to their main website. Also note
that you will only see the "public" pages of the private label site in this example.
Once a student logs in, additional pages show up in the menu bar.
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Q: Do your Partners have to offer all of your courses on their website?
Each partner controls their own course catalog. They choose from the master
catalog courses they want to offer on their private label site. Thus, a partner
can focus very narrowly or can offer a broad range of courses. A partner can
choose to only offer their own courses. Naturally, the financial benefit of
offering more courses from other authors is significant, and thus we encourage our
partners to offer as many courses as they think would be of interest to their constituency.
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Q: How difficult is it to create a course on your system?
The entire system was designed with ease of use in mind. You can start out
with simple courses, and add more features to your course as you learn. For
example, a basic course might be text-only. This type of course is very simple
to create. You simply type in the text, or paste it in from your existing
documents.
Our system uses a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor for creating course
content. It works in a similar way to a word processing program, and allows
you to select fonts, sizes, styles, colors, etc.
You don't have to stop there! Our system includes many powerful and easy-to-use
features that can turn your course into a powerful, interactive, multimedia-rich,
individualized and personal course.
We encourage authors to add images and clip art to add color and interest to a course.
For this purpose, we offer free access to a very large and searchable database of
images and clip art to all course authors.
Other elements which add to the effectiveness of a course include quizzes and exams,
dynamic content, multimedia, and life coaching. We offer a simple quiz and exam
editor that makes it easy to create both simple and interactive testing components
to your course. Our dynamic content feature allows you to customize content
depending on how a student responds to a quiz. Adding multimedia is easy:
we take care of the programming and plumbing - you just ship us the video and audio
files and we take care of the rest!
Take a test drive! Take our new course Introduction to the EduPlex
Courseware Platform and create a sample course yourself!
We provide all of the content, and give you step-by-step instructions. When
you complete the course, you will have a fully functional course about education
on the internet, and a deep understanding of many of the features of our authoring
system. A special introductory offer (60%
off) is available on the home page.
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Q: Who provides the course mentors for mentored courses?
EduPlex is building a network of small group leaders or mentors that are specifically trained to operate
within our courseware mentoring system, including how to utilize our multi-interactive
video conferencing system and student/coach messaging and feedback systems.
We train each mentor both generally and specifically for courses they are signed
up to support.
Alternatively, any authoring partner may also supply their own mentors, or
request that we train their mentors for them.
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Q: How does a mentor interact with a student?
EduPlex provides an online multi-interactive video conferencing system for
small group leaders to
use for interacting with students, plus an on-site messaging system
and a social network system. Other student management tools are provided to the
mentor, as well. No telephone calls are required - it all
works over the internet. Obviously, if you only have a dial-up connection,
your video speed will be very slow, and you may decide to only use audio only.
Ideally, each student will invest in a low-cost webcam, if their computer does not
come with one built-in. This allows your
mentor and other students to see you, as well.
The value of the video connection is to help build a personal relationship between
the student and the mentor,
as well as with other students. This will enable the mentor to work with the student
more effectively, and dramatically increase the retention of the course material
for the student. Finally, we are interested in character and spiritual
formation, not just intellectual
education. Mentor-student interactions are key in assisting the student in life application of course material.
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Q: How do I get paid when my course is sold?
The author sets up the pricing for each course. There can be multiple prices
for a given course: for example, a course can be offered without credit (for personal enrichment), for credit, such as ACSI or AACC or even college or graduate credit, with or without coaching, and with or without physical materials shipped
to the student.
The pricing system includes setting how much life coaches
are paid. When a course
is sold, our system takes the pricing information set by the author, and splits
up the funds into various accounts according to the specified formula. This includes a service fee
to EduPlex, a reseller fee to whoever sold the course, and the life coach fee.
The remaining funds go into the author's institution account.
At the end of each financial period, the funds deposited in the various accounts
are paid out by EduPlex.
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Q: Do you offer courses in other languages?
A: Our initial release of the system is in English. However, we have already
partnered with ministries who are working in other languages. Our system supports
multiple languages for courses, and includes features that make it much easier to
translate courses into new languages. Our initial efforts will be Chinese,
Farsi and Spanish. If you are interested in courses offered in other languages,
or are interested in helping EduPlex establish a new language, let us know.
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Q: How does the multiple language feature work?
A: Non English partners connect their websites to a translated version of our private
label site. For example, a ministry reaching out to the Chinese community
will have a website primarily or completely in Chinese, and will offer courses to visitors to
their site. Their private label link will take them to the appropriate version
of our private label site. In this case, it would be the Chinese version.
All courses displayed in the course catalog will be in Chinese only - i.e., English
courses will not show up in the catalog when you are on the Chinese site.
Thus, there is no direct access to other languages of our site from this, our main
site. Access is only from partner sites that are in the specified language.
If you are interested in viewing one of our non-English sites, we can provide links
for you.
Q: What assurance do I have that people I send to EduPlex to take courses will actually
learn the material?
A: One of the key elements of our relational education system is the coach-student
interactions. For coached courses, these interactions are not optional, and are placed at critical
points in the course material. Students must interact with the life coach before
they can proceed with the course. This eliminates cramming, a major cause
of fake learning. The coach will ask the students questions, and review their
exam and quiz responses to determine if the student is ready to proceed. If
not, the coach will work with the student to get them to that point. Thus,
to ensure that students you send to our system actually learn the material you want
them to learn, select coached courses only.
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