[00:00:00] Speaker A: I also think that love of chemistry is related to just what an elegant subject it is. It just really, piece by piece, puzzle piece by puzzle piece just kind of fits together and this gorgeous panorama view of a subject that makes sense of so many things.
I'm just really intrigued and excited about it and feel so privileged to actually get to teach a subject that I love.
ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and Intellig.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Is it possible to integrate the evidence for intelligent design into full length high school level biology and chemistry courses? Of course. And are such courses currently available to homeschool students? Absolutely. Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Discovery Institute Academy offers innovative online science courses for homeschool students taught from the perspective that nature reflects intelligent design.
And today I'm welcoming the instructors of DI Academy's biology and chemistry courses, Kristin Murray and Sommer Edwards, to give us a fresh look at this year's courses. Kristin Sommer, welcome to the podcast.
[00:01:13] Speaker A: Great to be here. Thank you, Andrew.
[00:01:15] Speaker C: Yes, thank you.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: Yeah. So let's start with a bit of introduction from you both. I know we did this last year, but some people may not have caught the episode. Can both of you touch on your educational background briefly, your experience teaching and. And why you love the subject that you're teaching this year?
[00:01:31] Speaker A: Yeah, I've got a bachelor of science in biochemistry and a master's in teaching.
And then I did about probably 10 years of teaching experience in the public school arena.
Seven of those were actually in an online high school here in Washington state.
And I think as far as subject matter goes, honestly Andrew, I would say starting high school, I already was cut out for chemistry. Um, I think I had just an innate, ah, I don't know what the word would be, maybe a little bit of like an innate frustration or curiosity or what have you, that I loved biology, but that it was not enough. I needed more, I needed more details. And anybody that knows me knows that I'm very detail oriented and chemistry just kind of satisfies that for me. Um, but I also think, I also think that love of chemistry is related to just what an elegant subject it is. It just really piece by piece, puzzle piece by puzzle piece just kind of fits together and this gorgeous panorama view of a subject that makes sense of so many things.
I'm just really intrigued and excited about it and feel so privileged to actually get to teach a subject that I love.
[00:02:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
Yeah, that's great. How about you, Summer?
[00:02:57] Speaker C: So I've been teaching biology in different settings for 10 years now.
Seven years we're in a high school setting, taught biology and chemistry, so I understand Kristin's love for the subject.
I recently completed my master's degree in science and religion from Biola University and learned a little bit more about some of the philosophical reasons for ID and identifying design in biology, which is a fascinating experience.
Then I currently teach some science classes at the university level and then obviously here at Discovery Institute.
My passion for biology came when I was very young with an obsession for just noticing small things, whether that was watching birds, insects, and even today, I love identifying species and going out on a walk and finding new flowers and plants in my area that I hadn't seen before.
So kind of the big picture to the small picture of everything from biochemistry to ecology and the full biosphere and how it all fits together is just fascinating to me.
[00:04:20] Speaker B: That's great. And congrats on the degree. It really is great when teachers can be learners as well as instructors. You know, they go hand in hand, don't they?
[00:04:30] Speaker C: They do, yeah.
[00:04:31] Speaker A: They absolutely do. And students like it when you're learning alongside of them. And curious too. I mean, it just makes for a fun environment that everybody's on board the train to learn together. Yeah, you know.
[00:04:44] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Now, summer, this was your first year teaching biology at Discovery Institute Academy. What was your experience and how was it different from your expectations?
[00:04:55] Speaker C: It was fascinating. And truthfully, it was different in all positive ways. I was so used to teaching in the classroom where you get the one on one experience and the feedback is almost immediate. You can use formative assessments to see where your students are at in their understanding.
And this was bit more hands off than I was used to. But I was so excited to build relationships with the students that were in our Tier one program who I would see on a weekly basis. And just like Kristin said, it was learning from them, learning alongside them, being refreshed my own knowledge each week as we reviewed the material together.
So it was really fun to learn with them throughout the process.
But then it was also great to just explore this new side of teaching biology with an intelligent design perspective, because it completely reshapes the approach that you take to every element of teaching. You know, maybe the whole lesson setup would be the same, but the questions that you're asking are entirely different. And science is all about asking questions and it's all about investigating and assessing the evidence together. So that experience was incredible.
[00:06:20] Speaker B: Yeah, that's awesome. Now, Kristen, it's easy to think of how ID relates to biology, since evolution is one of the main topics in a traditional setting. But what does it look like to integrate ID into a chemistry curriculum?
[00:06:33] Speaker A: I'm going to be very honest with you, Andrew, that when I first started this endeavor, that was a mystery to me. I thought, what. What have I gotten myself into?
Because I like most people, you're right. I could quickly see the connections for biology, but I wasn't as sure where that was going. You know, where you're going to thread the needle with chemistry and id.
That said, I think where, you know, this, this is going to be my fourth year of the course.
I can see now that there are actually many places that one can make chemistry and ID connections that I just needed time to kind of distill and explore. And so I'll just share like one or two, and then as time permits, maybe another one further down the line.
But I think one of the areas that students first kind of look into an ID chemistry connection is as they are learning about the ways that light helps us elucidate the electronic kind of structure and organization of the atom.
That's a great segue to, hmm. It's interesting that our sun and many stars seem to emit just in the right frequency, the particular light and heat that is needed for life.
And then also interesting that our atmosphere seems to also permit that light and heat to reach us here on Earth.
And because, and I think this is so cool because the chemistry students at that junction in time are already kind of learning about the electromagnetic spectrum, which for our listeners is everything from those X rays at the hospital to the microwaves in your kitchen, to the radio waves, you know, on your, your, your car stereo. They quickly kind of get Dr. Michael Denton's point from his book Children of Light, where they read an excerpt or two that there's a vast range in the electromagnetic spectrum. And so it's so uncanny and so curious that that particular range of light and heat is what is strongly emitted by our sun and many stars. And then also so curious that our atmosphere, if you will, kind of screens out many of the ranges that are negative and dangerous for us, but permit this particular light and heat to reach us. It just kind of raises questions of, wow, this, this looks very uncanny. This, this looks somewhat designed.
Another kind of area that again, Dr. Michael Denton connects to the class again, is, is. Is water.
You know, chemistry students already know, having done numerous sketches of the water molecule, that this is a very significant molecule, and they've already understood from their class, you know, studies that water is a very polar molecule due to its shape and due to the bonds that it has.
And so from there they, they kind of segue to all these unique properties that water has. Its viscosity, the fact that it has a high specific heat capacity, it takes a lot of energy to raise water's temperature.
The fact that water is a universal solvent due to its polarity, it can just dissolve lots of different things. This and so much more. But Dr. Denton helps them kind of take that one step further. And it's not just, ooh, water is so magical. I mean it is, it's really cool. But what about the fact that water actually is integral to both the hydrological cycle or, you know, the water cycle, if you will, and plate tectonics and that it facilitates both of those by its very own innate properties?
Yet another way that chemistry and ID can kind of fit hand in glove. And I think that over the course of, you know, future years, I hope we can just look for even more of those for students. Again, I might share something later, but that's just to wet your, your listeners appetites.
[00:10:41] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So it's almost like you have to take it to a hidden level when you're talking about chemistry and the design of the universe because it's really chemistry first, then life. And so a lot of chemical conditions have to be just right.
And then you look at, well, what explanations of life can best answer that evidence.
So that's great that you explore a lot of that.
[00:11:10] Speaker A: I want to thank you for that little segue, by the way, Andrew, because where you were just headed is what I'll touch on maybe a little bit later. And that is the huge role that origin of life research plays in our class for students. But we'll come back.
[00:11:23] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Now just a word on the course and its flexibility. There are three tier options offered for the class now, Kristen, can you review those for us and what each one provides?
Yeah.
[00:11:36] Speaker A: And you know, initially, Andrew, we only had one version of the course when we first launched and it was, it was the live version. And I think we just kind of realized that homeschool families like options for our listeners out there. We heard you, you want to do things your own way and go your, you know, your own pace. And so with some thought and significant effort on summer and I's part of, we parsed out what that would look like and we kind of came up with three different tiers, as we call them, for families to choose from. And so as succinctly as I can here, if you are looking, if you're a family that's like, you know, I want my student to have the full experience. I want the live teacher, I want the instructor that grades my students assessments. I want the feedback from the instructor, I want progress reports from the instructor.
Then the live tier one course, which is synchronous. Synchronous in the sense that your students are working in step with one another and the instructor and kind of progressing through the course. You're going to want to go with tier one, and I will make a shameless plug that. I think tier one is fabulous just for the amount of interaction that your students get with Summer and I. Yes, Summer's agreeing with that.
[00:12:54] Speaker C: Second that. Yes.
[00:12:55] Speaker A: Yeah, she seconds that. And also, let's not forget the interaction they get with their peers.
Right. So there's just this wonderful cohort that forms over the course of the year and it's really special and organic and authentic relationships. Now, if it's fine if you don't want to take me up on that. So listeners, if you're like, I need more flexibility than that for. For a variety of reasons. So Summer and I will have families that either they have very busy schedules or children who have a very.
I've had students that have really significant extracurricular commitments.
They're talented gymnasts or musicians or in plays and so they can't commit to a regular schedule. Or I just have students that want to and families that want to move more slowly for a variety of reasons, health reasons or preference.
So those two options would be tier two and tier three. And tier two would be for the family that they. They do want to go ahead and progress through the course on their own, but they want the option to meet with an instructor on a once a week basis, almost like a tutoring capacity. Not in the sense that Summer and I are going to reteach the whole week's lessons, but more in the sense that you come to us and say, you know, Summer, I was going over the, you know, photosynthesis and I just, I'm not understanding this. Or Kristen, I was doing this problem on stoichiometry and I'm getting stuff stuck. Can you help me finish this problem? No problem. That's the tier two Tier one. Or, sorry, tier three would be we want to do this totally alone. We want to. We want to row our own boat. And that is fine. You know, sometimes you get families in the homeschool community where mom, dad, auntie, uncle, grandma, grandpa is very proficient in a particular subject area and they want to have that opportunity to work through, you know, the Curriculum with the student.
Um, other times you will have students that are just exceptionally motivated and they want to progress through the course totally on their own, hands off.
And so we have all of those options. The only additional thing that I will say that I suspect our listeners would want to be assured of is whether you choose tier one, two, or three, we can assure you that you will have access to the same content.
All of our students will have access to a portal that will have our sequenced curriculum, ranging from readings, handouts, pre recorded video lectures, and again, that's true for all the tiers. So even a student in the live class can witness the pre recorded lectures, but they get additional teaching and instruction and fleshing out in the live class, and they all get access to the same wet labs, and they all get access to the same virtual simulations with labster. And the main difference is when you go tier one, you're getting a live instructor and you're getting assessment and grading that's overseen by that instructor. That's the main difference.
[00:16:02] Speaker B: Okay, yeah, that's a great breakdown of all three tiers. And we're talking maximum flexibility there. Now, Summer, how would you describe the teacher student interactions in the Tier 1 section of the course? What do you do to engage students in an online setting?
And for those students in tier 2, how do you keep them engaged with the curriculum?
[00:16:22] Speaker C: Yeah. So just to piggyback off of Kristen for a moment, I had a number of students and parents who had enrolled their students in the Tier 1 section of the course, give feedback at the end of the year. That said, this was my student's first time interacting with a live teacher, and it was incredible.
So for our tier one students, I think that they get a new level of not just support and accountability, but also challenge, because there's immediate feedback to the questions that they have, and then follow up questions to challenge their thinking and get them to think deeper about what they're wondering about in the first place. Okay, so that was a fantastic experience at the end of last semester. But to keep students engaged, I have started integrating case studies into our live lessons.
One in particular that I found fascinating was actually an article published in Cell about the Baju people of Southeast Asia.
It was a very strong argument for naturalistic evolution among this nomadic tribe of people because of an enlarged spleen that allowed them to deep dive for F.
And we took the article and the video that went along with it and kind of dissected the claims that were being made. It was taught within the human genetics unit. So students had A good understanding of Mendelian inheritance and variation within genetics. So it was really interesting to hear their take on. Okay, where in this article are we seeing naturalistic claims that are indicative of the author's worldview and how that researcher is actually interpreting the evidence that they're seeing?
And based on the evidence that we're reading from this article, is there an alternative explanation other than naturalistic evolution?
The students ideas were absolutely fascinating. I mean, we had every thought from, you know, if they primarily eat fish, could this also be mercury poisoning because mercury can enlarge the spleen? Could this just be a genetic inheritance that because they're such a small group, gets passed on within this very small tribe because of, you know, internal marriages?
And so it was fascinating to hear their perspective and towards the end of the second semester when they had learned so much about the two different worldviews and how to interpret the evidence from those perspectives.
[00:19:17] Speaker B: Wow. Yeah, those case studies sound sound like a great opportunity to do what these courses are doing as well. And that is to not just share evidence from intelligent design, but but also to help students to approach science with an ID perspective, with an intelligent design framework and ask the right questions and, you know, approach research questions, you know, in that way. And so those case studies sound awesome for that. Now, Kristen, I bet you look forward to the weekly interactive zoom sessions that you have with students in that tier one course option. What's your experience been with that?
[00:19:58] Speaker A: Oh, I do.
I'm going to take a quick back step though. And I given I loved first of all, Summer, I hadn't heard about that case study that you did with your students. I think that is so fantastic. And Andrew, if it's okay, having just heard from Summer what she does with her students, I'm just going to make a shameless plug for Summer's class. I one of her students.
I don't know if it was a student, Summer or a parent. I just want to read their comment about their experience in Summer's class, which I totally think is related to the type of case studies that Summer talks about.
Just quoting this Summer again, student or this was a student.
[00:20:36] Speaker C: Here you go.
[00:20:37] Speaker A: Going into this class, I wasn't super excited about biology. I found myself halfway through the course eagerly awaiting the next week's content week by week. This class has taught me so much about biology and intelligent design and keeps me curious in my everyday life. Mrs. Edwards does a fantastic job leading each week's class and helping us understand the content.
I absolutely just feel given the description again of the kind of interaction Summer would do with the case studies that that is not a surprising quote whatsoever on my end. You know, you're asking about, you know, what does engagement look like in tier one with my class? Andrew, one of the big things both Summer and I both push for is keep those cameras on.
There's nothing worse for both a student and the instructor to have a blank icon on a zoom screen.
Nobody wants that, you know, and so we really, even for our shy students, we nudge, nudge at the very beginning of the year and kind of set that as an expectation that we really do want to be upfront and personal and engaging with each other, that this not be a giant screen of fake icons. You know, another thing is, I mean, you get really good as an online instructor and I have done this for many years now, spotting if a student is getting a little tired or, you know, didn't you missed breakfast or is just slightly distracted. And I really make a point, and I think Summer does too, of regularly popcorn calling on students in class, keep them on their toes constantly in a particular slide. Did you catch this? What about that so and so can you explain this to us? What would you expect or what do you predict?
The more you call on students, the more they stay with you from start to finish. And I have had in my own feedback from students. I'm not going to pull up any specific quotes, but I have definitely had students comment that they, they really felt engaged in the online tier one sessions. And I think that they were surprised by that. And I'm not sure, Andrew, if that was in prior experience online, it was more just kind of sit there, be quiet, take in information, and end the class.
I'm not sure, but that is absolutely not their experience with Summer and I. They, they are on their toes and engaging with us and each other constantly. Summer and I wouldn't have it any other way. That's much more fun and relational to us.
[00:23:14] Speaker B: Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I mean, even adults, you know, can have trouble sitting in on zoom meetings, you know, and we're just kind of waiting for the end. But it's awesome to hear about ways that you draw the students in, that you encourage them and that you leave them, you know, as, as that quote mentioned, feeling eager to get to the next content. You know, that is what it's all about. And I'm glad you're finding ways to do that even in an online setting. Now self directed learning obviously can be a lonely enterprise. Have you, have either of you found ways to involve the Parents in the course process. I know you mentioned progress reports, which parents will be eager to. To. To see.
Are there any other ways you're involving them? And what about the students interacting with one another? Do they get a chance to do that outside of the class, zoom or what would you say to that?
[00:24:11] Speaker C: We look for opportunities to engage with parents beyond just those progress reports. Most of that we want to be voluntary. So we offer for parents to sign up for parent teacher conferences or start of the year, getting to know you sort of meetings so that they can ask questions that they have or provide individualized feedback for their particular student. Going back very briefly to your question about how do we keep our Tier two students engaged? I actually found that I had more communication with the Tier 2 parents than with the Tier 1 parents because the Tier 2 parents still understood that it was their responsibility for grading and everything else. But because of that weekly meeting, the parent could jump in and ask a question if needed or have their student follow up with a question to me if they had one. So Tier two really gives a happy blend of both worlds where you have the teacher support to both the student and the parent, but you are not entirely hands off. You still get to be engaged as a parent with your child's learning.
So that's probably the way that we engage parents in Tier one and Tier two. Tier three, as mentioned, is a lot more hands off.
And so parents are welcome to reach out if it's a question directly about the curriculum. But we're not intentionally reaching out to them. We're assuming that they wanted to purchase a product versus being engaged in an ongoing discussion. So that's kind of the difference between the three.
[00:25:50] Speaker A: Okay, I will.
I'll chime in and piggyback from what Summer said, that one of my favorite ways to interact with Tier one or, or even a Tier two family, but most likely Tier one on this front is, and I think I learned this from being in the classroom too, the brick and mortar classroom.
Parents and guardians are used to only hearing from a teacher when there's bad news.
And inevitably, like when they see that it's an email from a teacher, they're like, oh, no. So one of my favorite ways to interact with families is to just completely sidestep that and surprise them by sending them random happy updates about their particular student. And I'm not faking this. It's given with great sincerity. And let me tell you, there are many ways to do this. I will get.
Yeah.
This past year, I will have students that maybe submit an absolutely Fantastic essay response for something. Just stellar. I absolutely love copying and pasting their response in an email off to mom, dad, you know, parent, guardian, and being like, take a look, look at this fine piece of work, you know, or snipping a screenshot of a really technical calculation that they've done and showing again, the family. Look at this, look at this top notch work. Right? And I'll CC the student on the email so that the whole family can celebrate. Wow, look at what's going on in my student's life. The other way that I will connect with tier one or even a tier two family is sometimes Summer and I get asked if our courses can work with students that have various learning disabilities, could be specific academic struggles. And what I always tell folks is, you know, no, we're not per se. You know, we're definitely, we're not a, you know, credit bearing institution that does IEPs and so forth, but very naturally and organically. Summer and I will work on an individual level with our families. And so another way that I'm connecting with both student and family is when there is that kind of need going on, we will usually work individually with the family and could be making adjustments to a particular assessment, could be adjusting that particular student's pacing, could be making a different way for them to demonstrate understanding.
And so that is yet another way of engaging with our families and students.
[00:28:22] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's wonderful that you do that. Now, these courses offer the fundamentals of biology and chemistry, but they also stand out from other similar courses because they're modeling an intelligent design perspective in science, and the evidence for ID is built right into each unit. So can each of you just briefly comment on what this adds to the learning and maybe give us just one example of how it comes up in class?
[00:28:46] Speaker A: I, I will jump in and then Summer, go ahead. I alluded earlier, Andrew, that there's yet another area that chemistry and ID connect, and that's an origin of life type discussions. And so a huge theme that comes up in our class is asking what, how, how, how likely is it that the very first life, that very first cell could have arose through a purely blind, unguided chance process, like, to use the terminology, the students encounter chemical evolution.
And students quickly realize as we parse that out, which we take great lengths to do. This is not done in a paragraph like your, you know, college biology experience was, where you glossed over the origin of life in one page. We, we parse this out, Andrew, over the course of two semesters in small, discrete chunks in students Quickly, we, you know, we kind of call it the six stages, if you will, of the origin of life. Students kind of quickly parse out, okay, can I. Can I create those basic building blocks, those monomers of nucleotides, amino acids, monosaccharides. Can I then. Can I then link those together like beads on a string, or polymerize them, you know, into larger, longer macromolecules, and then can I then enclose those into some type of vesicle that keeps the. The bad stuff from coming in, you know, these kinds of questions, and eventually, you know, what point does this become a living, functioning cell?
And I think the way that this is significant for students is I think that they grasp over the course of the year that this is no small feat and that synthetic chemists out there, like Dr. You know, Dr. Tour, understand that there are pages and pages of method sections, you know, in papers that are literally dedicated to trying to create the kind of conditions required to synthesize, you know, simple molecules, let alone your first cell. And they get a deep appreciation of that. That carries them probably into future university courses, too.
[00:30:59] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great start for kids. Yeah. To see just how difficult this problem is.
Yeah. How about you, Summer?
[00:31:08] Speaker C: Essentially, we pick up where Kristen just left off in our first two units. When we cover biochemistry, macromolecules, and the cell, we're talking about those exact same things, but it's an introduction. It's just the start.
And so we spend the rest of the year then looking at, okay, what implications does that have for the development of organs and organ systems and an organism and a full species and a population of those individuals and then the community and the ecosystem. And that's where things get just absolutely wild. Because the more complex a system we'll just stick to the word system becomes, the less likely it has, the less likely it is to have evolved by chance.
So we start with the small, and we work our way to the large.
And students get to identify at each stage of that, the different evidence for design, whether that's through reading your designed body and looking at the different human body systems or even just exploring their own ecosystems in the states where they live, which is a fun thing to compare. When we get into those live group discussions, they're realizing, like, wow, I.
I always knew that this is way too complex to have come about by chance, but I didn't have the evidence before, I didn't have the reasoning before to support that belief.
And most students, that's their final takeaway is, like, now I can defend exactly what I believe because of what we've covered in this class.
[00:32:59] Speaker B: Yeah, that's wonderful. And just a side question, I was just wondering to myself, have you had any students who have taken both courses yet? That's obviously a possibility, but didn't know if it happened yet.
[00:33:11] Speaker A: Not yet, but I can't wait for that to happen because I think that will be so fulfilling for Summer and I to kind of witness somebody that progresses through both courses and what do they walk away with? You know, that I think that would be so cool. Andrew?
[00:33:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
While students are learning what it looks like to study science with the perspective that nature reflects intelligent design.
So given that, what do you think are some ways that ID implications help students navigate present day issues or have a better lens for thinking through them?
[00:33:42] Speaker C: One of the things that we discuss kind of as another case study, but more of a philosophical case study, is the sanctity of human life at every stage, whether it's the development in the womb and just the irreducibly complex nature of the sequence of events that have to occur in order for that baby to develop correctly, or population dynamics and the number of people in the world and how the ecosystem supports that number of people, and how our earth is perfectly designed for human life and scientific discovery.
And so when students get to see the full spectrum of the minute to the expansive, they come away thinking not just about, oh, wow, biology's really cool, but they start to apply ethical reasoning to how they make decisions based on the fact that what we see in the world from the minute to the expansive is designed. And that really can change in a positive way. Especially when you take that understanding into, you know, reading the news or going to college or just experiencing the world. It can lend a really positive perspective on life.
[00:35:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I love what you just said, Summer. I'm not sure I could have said that any better. And I kind of thinking about any additional implications of taking a course in high school with an ID component. I mean, let's just thinking, Andrew, about some of the present day hot topics right now. You know, one of them, of course, is AI.
And of course, you know, students are asking, you know, is AI going to replace us? Right.
And I think having a design perspective, and of course there's facets of discovery that dig into AI and what are its limitations and so forth, you know, but having a perspective of design, I think put students in a position perhaps of saying, well, actually there's a programmer and there's coding and there's human input that goes into AI And I think it helps them understand that actually human exceptionalism is a thing, you know.
Similarly, I know another hot topic item that listeners out there, if any of you have been following some of the commentary that my husband Casey Luskin has been up to, Idaho has a lot to say, say about the present interest in alien life.
And I think if you kind of tune in to some of the commentary that Casey has made and this is true, even we don't necessarily, we haven't yet got into this in class. But I think for students, say in my particular class for chemistry in particular, you know, Andrew, they've spent a full year thinking about origin of life type research. Right. And they've come to see the challenge with creating just one single living cell. I'm not talking about a multicellular organism here, I'm just talking about one living cell.
I think that those students, and again Casey, I'm kind of stealing his thunder here, but I think that those students quickly see that if it's very unlikely that life evolved here and thus it is best explained that life here is the result of design, they are far less likely to fall prey to the idea just on account of our vast universe. Statistically we're, we're just, we're definitely going to find life out there.
And if I, I think that they would understand further that if we ever did, it would be a case for design.
[00:37:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:36] Speaker A: Not a case for evolution.
And so I think those are some very interesting present day hot topic items that a student who has taken summarized class is going to be able to engage with in a far more logical way.
[00:37:54] Speaker B: Yeah. And again shows that perspective that nature reflects intelligent design, just the fruitfulness of taking that with you into other things that are happening around you. Now before we go, we should point out how credit works with these courses. Samar, can you tell us just how these courses are best suited to or who they're best suited for and what role parents might play in that with regard to credit?
[00:38:21] Speaker C: Certainly.
So Kristin has mentioned that we are not a credit bearing institution. So we can't, you know, provide a transcript, but we can provide parents with the best feedback possible so that they can give a final assessment of their students performance in the class.
Now in a tier one setting, it's us providing that in the form of a final grade, full assessments throughout the entire course. So regular repeated assessments and opportunities for regaining credit and all of those sort of things.
For tiers 2 and 3, the parent is the sole assessor and gives the final grade for those students without any feedback. From us as the instructors.
So ultimately the final grade rests on the parents shoulders.
But again, in that tier one setting, we're willing to give as much feedback as needed for those parents to make that final decision.
[00:39:22] Speaker B: Now, Kristin, maybe you can wrap us up with deadlines for registration and where we can go to learn more and to register.
[00:39:30] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:39:31] Speaker A: All right. To all my homeschool families out there, I just want you to know that we have begun to understand that you folks sometimes like to wait to register.
And I think some of that is it's Summer and there's watermelons and water parks and beaches and traveling. I think other part of it is like everybody, there's just so many choices for you guys out there. But I really want to nudge our families that if you're thinking about our course in any way, don't wait too much longer. We've got an early bird deadline for registration for our course. That's July 30th. And we've extended, extended that to accommodate you traveling campers out there that are having a good time.
And then we also, our kind of final regular deadline is August 24th.
And you can find everything that you need to find out about our courses.
I'm going to make sure I say this right because it's somewhat of an unusual course registration site. But our, our website is Discovery Institute Academy. So I'm going to say that again. Discovery Institute Academ.
And when you're there, you're going to see there's a link to both summer's course and a link to both my course.
And as succinctly as possible, we've actually just recently revised these two pages to get you guys information in the most concise fashion possible because we're beginning to understand that you, you have lots of sources and sites to go peruse. So here's what you're going to find. Short and sweet. You're going to find that our. I'll just use chemistry as an example here.
You're going to find that our courses are going to span from September 8th to June 4th. That's our live tier one kind of course period. You're going to find information about our respective textbooks. Summer uses a, I think it's an open stacks biology course. I use a Pearson chemistry textbook. Think of those again as just one piece of many curriculum pieces that we offer your students. But that info is there. We've even just recently added a course preview.
This allows you as a parent. I'm really excited about this, folks. You can go to that course preview, create a free quick account for Discovery U, which is where our course is hosted. And right away see a see a sample module for Summer's biology course and also a sample module for my course and have access to our syllabus and course agreement. So again, that is DiscoveryInstitute Academy.
All the info that you need is there and there's a link inside. Once you've reached our course, landing pages to register.
[00:42:12] Speaker B: Okay. And as a homeschooling parent myself, I can say that that discount is helpful when it comes to all the rising costs these days. So $50 off tuition for a limited time. And again, the website is DiscoveryInstitute Academy. Well, Kristen Sommer, thanks for taking time out dropping by and giving giving us an update on your courses. I wish you well this year.
[00:42:36] Speaker A: Thank you, Andrew. It's great to be with you.
[00:42:38] Speaker C: Yes, thank you very much.
[00:42:40] Speaker B: Yeah. So once again, DiscoveryInstitute Academy is where you need to go to learn more about the courses and to register.
Well, I'm Andrew McDermott for ID the Future. Really appreciate you taking time today. We'll see you next time.
[00:42:54] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
