OIKOS created an academic wing that offers master's degrees to DAVT candidates seeking non-levitical ordination. It launched during the pandemic and served multiple time zones across Asia with 500 broadcast hours in 2020. The college administrators realised an opportunity to establish an extension campus in partnership with Thai counterparts in Chiang Mai. The extension campus certifies candidates with a licentiate degree (Lic.) for ministry pilots in various marketplace spheres of impact beyond the church's four walls. This is how King's College Singapore was born.
They set up a planning and development team using challenged-based self-organization to prepare M.A. students in theology for graduate research methodology, supported by the use of micro-learning. The goal is to propagate higher order thinking, especially among seminary collaborators posted in off-grid frontier missions who have no readily available means to further their theological education. The actions were meant to close the admin loops and tighten up on necessary protocols and processes for new students to matriculate into an online system that delivers mobile-first courseware to optimize existing video platforms such as Youtube and Vimeo.
To ensure that the scholars would be adequately equipped for the long haul, an organisational structure was mooted with a Board of Trustees chaired by Madam Krisna Juttiwitikarn at Mountain View and a Deanery headed by Dr. Preecha Jengjalern, a former Chairman of the Evangelical Fellowship of Thailand and the Senior Pastor of Santisuk Ratchamanka Church in Chiang Mai Province.
Several new courses were launched during this period, including Culture, C-BAM, and Heuristics, aimed at higher order lateral thinking to solve problems requiring out-of-the-box and custom-made solutions. During the upcoming CNX Accelerator from September 4-8, they plan to introduce a new learning platform called Gnowbe, which is the brainchild of a Korean Christian missional leader, So-Young Kang, who has made her home in Singapore.
The burn rate for this coming September 4-8 is estimated at approximately $7k SGD as they consolidate the vision of higher order thinking and export it using appropriate tech platforms. By limiting each cohort to 15 candidates, they believe that there can better control the quality of their products, including the delivery of their signature courseware on Modalities.