Professor Donald Parry reimagines Learning Suite to develop a program for teaching biblical Hebrew—completely online.
In 2011, BYU introduced a new online program to transform the way students learn beyond the walls of the classroom: Learning Suite. This program has helped students stay on top of their courses, turn in assignments, contact teachers and TAs, and even take tests, all online. After years of using Learning Suite for his traditional, in-person classes, Professor Donald Parry (Hebrew Bible and Dead Sea Scrolls) began constructing three online Learning Suite courses to help off-campus students learn the ins and outs of biblical Hebrew without ever stepping foot in the classroom.
Parry’s new program gives students access to five tools that distinguish it from most online courses: The Frequency Dictionary of the Hebrew Bible, The Hebrew Bible with Analytical Keys, The Biblical Hebrew Learning Tool, a new biblical textbook designed for the course (Biblical Hebrew—Easier and More Fun!), and The Biblical Hebrew Picture Dictionary.
Biblical Hebrew Tools
Partnering with the Office of Digital Humanities’s WordCruncher team—including Jason W. Dzubak as director, Lauryn M. Wilde as project manager, and Dr. Monte F. Shelley as emeritus director—Parry created three of the tools that students use throughout the course, including the Analytical Keys tool, The Biblical Hebrew Learning Tool, and the Frequency Dictionary, which acts similarly to a linguistic corpus. In it, students can look up the definition of each of the 9,369 different words introduced in the Hebrew Bible along with statistical information such as the word’s rate of occurrence. Parry explains that this tool “accelerates learning and builds students’ confidence [by] teaching the most common words in the Hebrew Bible, and then continuing to build on those common words by adding additional vocabulary.”
Likewise, Parry’s students have access to the Hebrew Bible with Analytical Keys tool, which, according to Parry, “provides the grammatical and lexical value of every single word in the Hebrew Bible—a total of 306,757 words!” Parry hopes that giving his students easy access to lexical tools will improve their ability to comprehend vocabulary and lexical word value.
Additionally, Parry collaborated with his colleague, Adjunct Professor Geraldine I. Clements, to create the Biblical Hebrew—Easier and More Fun! textbook, which he tailored to fit his students’ needs. This textbook differs from tradition in one specific way: after writing each chapter of the pre-published manuscript, the two authors invited students to review the information and provide feedback for its improvement. Parry explains that while “instructors comprehend various pedagogic approaches, students often have insights into the best practices to acquiring knowledge in the twenty-first century.” After reviewing the textbook, his students—Emily Mehr (Chaplaincy MA student), Rachel Schaumann, Jonathan Vassar, and Rebecca Miller (all undergraduate Asian and Near Eastern Languages students)—also helped with the development of homework exercises and vocabulary lists.
The Student Benefit
Parry has found that these tools provide biblical Hebrew students “access to the latest pedagogic strategies, including computer-based and interactive, online programs.” In his eyes, “Learning Suite presents indispensable resources for all students of biblical Hebrew.” He plans to make these resources available for undergraduates very soon.
Check out the Asian & Near Eastern Languages Department website to get involved in one of BYU’s Hebrew programs.