Changes in the ADC Office.

The instructors at ADC have been very busy this year and are looking forward to the Christmas and New Year break.

There are big changes in our office with staff changing.

Elena is leaving to go into full time study to add skills to her arts degree. Elena has been a faithful instructor mainly with correspondence students.

Elizabeth who has been our Senior Instructor for the last two years has accepted a call back to teaching next year. Thank you Elizabeth for your leadership and initiatives in the Bible School, and continued blessings as you serve Him in your new job.

We also have welcomed Emma last week to our office. She is keen and excited to share her faith with others and will minister to our online students. She has been trained well both in Moodle and also Janison.

Sharon who is one of our current instructors of long standing will step into the role of Senior Instructor. Welcome to the new responsibilities Sharon, and we all know that you will give 110% in your leadership.

Boli will also be returning from leave to assist Sharon in answering the correspondence courses.

A New Course Released at ADC.

Our Digging Deeper course which is the second in the series for Diggings was released just yesterday on the moodle platform. Go and have a look at this new course. It has some really great photo and images.

A New Course Program

We have now transferred 3 of our courses from our Janison course website to our new look Moodle course website. They are still if not more attractive and easy to navigate then our other course platform.

If your interested we have our most popular courses on this platform. Digging Up the Past, Taking Charge of your Life and Health. They have a new look! We are happy for you to come browse and have a go at these courses.

Thoughts about my new job

Hi! I am a new instructor here at ADC. I just started working here since October 21. In the beginning, I was very excited, but a little anxious at the same time. Would I be able to learn all the things in time before Annali leaves? What if I make mistakes? What if people here don’t like me? Plus, I am not a computer expert, so learning to use two web-based programs was a bit of a challenge. However, I knew that God always knows what is best for me, and has been guiding my life. And I loved working with the students. So, I left it all up to God, and trusted that He would lead me to the right direction.

Now, after 8 working days of working with our team, I have learnt how exciting it can be to witness the students learn and grow. I have learnt to empathise with the students when they are struggling, feel excited when students are making positive lifestyle changes in their life, and feel overwhelmed when you see students develop a meaningful relationship with Christ. I just couldn’t help, but to ask God, “What have I done to deserve this privilege, to witness the Holy Spirit working in people’s lives on a daily basis? Further more, I found the team here are so friendly and care for each other. I really could not ask for more.

As you experience God’s love and care in your life, you start to share that love and care with others around you. So, I know that everyone in our team is doing their bits to share His message of hope with the students and with each other. And this is what God has asked all of us to do.

I am still new to my work, and it would take years for me to become an expert like Annali.But I thank God that I can still do my best within my ability to share His love and care to others in an environment such as this. May God bless everyone here at ADC and all the students that we come in contact with, as we all do our best to wait for Jesus’ return.

Staff members come and go!!

We know that changes happen, some quickly and others very slowly. This one however, has caught us all by surprise this last month @ ADC.

Annali our online courses instructor is moving on in another direction which involves further study herself. We here at ADC will miss her bright smile and out there ideas to promote and improve the courses online.

We haven't left our online students without an instructor to encourage them. We have a new online instructor Boli she comes to us with new insights and enthusiasm for working with our online student community. Don't worry Boli has been trained well by Annali in both our new Moodle courses and the current Janison lessons. Don't be afraid to drop a line and say Hi to her.

If you have any ideas please feel free to let us know to help us update and keep current with new media.

Various Ways Student's find out about our Courses

We hear from time to time how some of our students find out about our courses. They hear about them from friends of the great course they are doing, or they receive a card in their letter box and write in for the course.

Others are surfing the web and find our web page. Still others send in because they have watched Hope channel or the Christian TV channels where our courses are advertised. We also receive a lot of requests via people who read the Signs of the times magazine where 1 or 2 of our courses are advertised every month.

One of our students told us recently that while he was sitting on a park bench praying, the wind blew a card against his leg and this is how he found out about the first course he did with us. Isn't that an amazing story!

There are many more stories that we have heard, but these are the main ones.

We've come so far and we've got so far to go!

In the last year, our instructors have marked over 3000 lessons, processed nearly 2000 applications and had more than 120 people graduate from a course online! Thats just the online school!
We also have students from all around the world- approximately 106 countries!

We have so much to be thankful for!

What are you going to ask when you get to heaven?

is one of the questions we pose in our Kid's course "Lets Explore" This week we had a student who wanted to thank their guardian angel for protecting them, and wants to ask what they were protected from.
Sounds like it could have an interesting answer, how long do you have?
Its somewhat profound that we have potentially thousands of blessings that we don't know about simply because the blessing is that it never actually happened. Add that to the blessings we do know about and it should give us at least one reason to smile on a less than perfect day..

How would you answer the above question?

Can one person really make a difference?

On July 6, 1994, one man from South Australia began a ministry. Not a big, or complicated one, but he felt called to give out letterbox cards and signs magazines. In January last year, he gave out his millionth letterbox card!! Now we estimate that he's up to 1, 200,000 cards, and he's still going. We have so many correspondance students because of this mans quiet ministry. He's been able to minster to thousands of people, and see Australia at the same time! Sometimes a local church will help him out with fuel and accommodation expenses for his car and caravan, but God is blessing him with what he needs to make it happen..He's just asked for some more Letterbox cards, as he's run out, and these are provided free of charge from the discovery centre to churches and related individuals.
One more thing... He turned 82 this year!

News from afar

We got a letter this morning from Kenya, East Africa. They have been using a couple of our courses in a community Bible study sort of thing. These courses include the entire Diggings Series, The Try Jesus course, and the Health course. The young people in the church have enjoyed them, and the Bible class on Sabbath afternoons has grown to include pretty much the whole church. Its so exciting to hear what God is doing in other parts of the world! The writer also says that they were blessed by and are still praying for Pastor Gary Kent and John Jeremic who visited East Africa recently. You never know how much difference something little can do!



View Larger Map

Lift with your knees, not with your back

Not only do we get a lot of mail in, we send a lot of mail out as well! Normally another department takes care of sending out mail, but we are looking after that for the next little while. Its amazing the kinds of things you learn! Yesterday we sent out 81.125kg of mail from here. Thats a fraction over the average weight of a reasonably tall 20 year old male. (and no, no humans were posted.) Not all of it was us, but mostly. Wonder what the postman thought?

Bring on the rain!

For some unexplained reason, the amount of lessons we are getting online this month is definitely up. If we only had people from Australia doing lessons, perhaps it would be that during the winter months, people spend more time indoors, potentially on the computer and have more time to do it. However, having students all around the world means that its not the whole answer. So far this month, we've had students active (or doing lessons) from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Jamaica, Luxembourg, USA, Puerto Rico and Thailand.
We've had a bit of rain in sydney, so that could be contributing to the Australia numbers.. but whatever it is elsewhere, we aren't complaining..
If you've been praying for the ministry of the Adventist Discovery Centre, then keep it up!! Its definitely working. We're grateful for your support!

Stamps

Being both a correspondance centre as well as an online centre, you can imagine that we get a lot of stamps. A LOT of stamps if you count the ones students and supporters of the discovery centre send in also. We're really grateful to those who choose to send us their used stamps. Some people have even sent in entire collections for us! As a result, we get to see some pretty cool stamps from all around the world.

These stamps all go to auction through a friend of the discovery centre who sorts and prepares them. The money then goes to whatever our current project is at the time.

For example, we raised over $3500 for the Karen Refugees in Thailand, helping provide fresh water for communities in Thailand and Laos, a project to provide fresh water wells for refugees in Sudan, and getting satellite dishes with the hope channel installed in remote communities of Australia, particularly with a high Aboriginal population. Some of these projects have been matched by the Australian government, making what we were able to collect go so much further!

We haven't yet figured out any ways that online students can contribute to this project, as stamps aren't as abundant when you just click a button to send a lesson in. If you've got any ideas, we'd love to hear about them, but we do want to keep this as low cost to us and our students/supporters as possible so that we can send as much money as possible to the project.

If you want to support our stamp projects, you can send stamps to



Adventist Discovery Centre

PO Box 1115

Wahroonga NSW 2076

(Australia)

Meet an Instructor - Norm

We've been thinking it might be nice to share a tiny bit about our instructors, so that you know a little about us, and that we aren't computers sitting in an office somewhere! First off the rank is Norm. He's our main Digging Up the Past Instructor, and he does an awesome job of it!! Meet Norm :)

Born in England, after school went to Teacher Training College and became a primary teacher. After about five years of teaching was asked to become a missionary teacher in Ethiopia, and to do the mission accounts. Did a crash book-keeping course then learned on the job, so that when I returned to England after 15 years I was more an accountant than teacher. After coming to Australia I became involved with computers and gradually did less accounting and more computer management and programming, till I did one year of teaching and retired over a decade ago.

This is my sixth full month of on-line instructing. I like the ability to spend a short time each day checking answers and interacting with students. The best part about the job is when I have a specific question to try to answer and the joy of sending out the final certificate to someone who has worked right through the course to the end.

Apart from instructing, I do genealogical studies of the area my great grandparents came from in England and help other people who are doing family history research on their English ancestors. I also edit my local church bulletin each work, and the church on-line magazine every second month. I am also involved with helping with children's activities for 6 to 9 year old children in the Adventist church in Australia

If you want to do the Digging Up the Past course online, go to www.diggingupthepast.com.au

Meet more instructors, similar place, soon to come!

Get Involved

There is a big Adventist initiative this easter to donate blood. We would be thrilled to have more people participating, and you don't even have to be an Adventist! Donating blood saves lives, and this is a great opportunity to make a difference in someone elses life!
Here are some details...

Remember Jesus this Easter

This year, we have a very special Australian-wide campaign that we would love all Adventists to be a part of.

We want to remember the real meaning of Easter during this special season - the fact that Jesus died and gave his blood to save humanity. A practical way that we can respond is to donate blood to the Australian Red Cross Blood Service to help save someone’s life.

The “Ucan2” blood donor drive hopes to see at least 5000 Adventists donate blood in the lead up to Easter this year, and we want you to be a part of it.

Visit your local Australian Red Cross Blood Service Donor Centre throughout February and March to help meet the nation’s demand for 21,000 blood donations every week.

You will need to fill up the Donor Attendance form and hand in to the reception at your local donor centre. You can get this from the official Ucan2 campaign website, http://www.Ucan2online.org.au

Join Adventists around Australia in donating blood in the lead up to Easter to help save precious lives. Register your interest and/or your donation at http://www.Ucan2online.org.au.

If you have questions or want more information, go to the site, or contact us!!

Light of the World!!

Our newly revamped course has arrived!! Its always been a great course, but now it looks great too! 25 booklets of great gospelly goodness! Its not a hardcore course, but its all based on learning about Jesus- who he was, and what he did.

We're so excited to see this course- especially Sue, who has spent HOURS editing and updating and doing lots of fiddly stuff to get it ready- so to see it here, and be able to start sending it out to students is a huge buzz! We posted out the first 19 lessons this afternoon to students in New Zealand!

Lots more launch action coming, but for now, check out some pics of the fun!

Tuesday at the discovery centre

"Good Morning and welcome to the Adventist Media Network. The Discovery centre is upstairs and around the corner. Enjoy your visit!"

8:15 - Everyone in the Discovery Centre and Media Network gather for 15 mins of worship and prayer.
8:30 - Instructors collect and begin sorting mail
8:45 - Prayer Circle - we pray for our students and those involved in ministry for God around the world.
9:30 - Instructors get back to the mail, check how many online lessons are waiting, divide it up between instructors and send the 'too hard' questions on.
9:30-11:30 - Marking lessons, responding to students requests, questions and comments, emails, phone calls, processing applications.
11:30 - Sort and send the days mail down to the despatch department.
11:40 - Continue marking remainder of lessons.
12:30 - Lunch. YAAY!
1:30 - Instructors bounce back in the door refreshed and ready for the afternoons work.
1:35 - If marking complete, start on individual projects such as developing resource or promotional material, preparing courses in languages other than English
3:30 - Hey look!! Its the bosses birthday :) We better do something.. Everyone gathers for a short afternoon tea filled with much merriment.
3:45 - Suppose we better clean up after the afternoon tea!
4:00 - Photocopier breaks down, emergency callout for technical assistance.
4:03 - Everybody finds jobs that don't require the printer, as suddenly thats all anyone is needing to use.
4:05 - Liase with and prepare for volunteers who make this place run smoothly. (and you thought it was us??)
4:20 - We look up and smile sweetly, trying to be helpful to the group touring the centre who doesn't speak english, as we try and explain what we do here.
5:00 - We turn the phones off and start watching the clock! (Just Kidding- we do turn the phones off, but theres a complex shutdown proceedure we commence. We close the windows and blinds, turn the air conditioning off (then off again as we realise we just turned it on) Try and make enough sense of the work on our desks, so we know where to start in the morning.
5:13 - Symphony of computer logoff noises and swinging chairs
5:15 - Happy trot to the carpark. Except for the dedicated instructor who is working back this evening..

We hope you enjoyed a quick trip through a day here. Theres lots of random things that happen that you might not have seen today, but come another day! Who knows what you'll see!

The first one

Well, where dost one begin? Perhaps by means of a brief introduction to who we are and what we do.

The Adventist Discovery Centre is located in Sydney, Australia - one of many schools around the world. We offer courses in Archaeology, Lifestyle (Relationships, Health, Taking Charge of your Life) and of course Bible courses for both Kids and Adults. It is run as a service to the community, and courses are free when studied either online (www.discoverycourses.com) or by correspondance in Australia and New Zealand.
The Adventist Discovery Centre is run and supported by the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the south pacific division. (www.adventistconnect.org.au)
Stay tuned for updates and more information about what really does happen here. You might just be surprised!