Weekly Email: July 14, 2025
In this week’s email:
Student Tip - Online Education and the Fracture Mind: Rebuilding the Routines Online Education Has Erased
Program News - Information About Logos Max and Textbooks in Logos
Student Tip: Online Education and the Fractured Mind: Rebuilding the Routines Online Education Has Erased
You know that feeling when you sit down to study and your brain immediately starts bargaining with you? “Just check email first.” “Maybe scroll through news for five minutes.” “I should probably clean this desk before I start.”
It’s not laziness. It’s not lack of discipline. It’s something more fundamental: your mind doesn’t know it’s time to study, to be in student mode.
In traditional classrooms, you still face the same digital temptations. Your phone buzzes with notifications. You want to check social media, scan the news, respond to that urgent email. The pull is still there.
But something is different. There’s a room full of people around you. Your professor might catch you scrolling instead of taking notes. The student beside you can see your screen. There’s accountability built into the space itself.
You’re in one place, doing one thing, with one group of people. Your performance as a student is sequential meaning it begins when you walk into the classroom and ends when you leave. Humans are designed for this kind of physical presence, being fully in one location at one time. Digital life has changed this fundamental reality.
Online education removes all of that accountability. You’re studying in the same office where you prepare sermons, meet with counselees, handle church administration. Your brain can’t distinguish between study time and work time because nothing in your environment has changed. When distraction calls, there’s no one watching. No social pressure to stay focused. Just you, your laptop, and whatever else is competing for your attention.
Nicholas Carr, in his recent book, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart (I highly recommend by the way), describes how social life used to be “situated in the material world, its pace and texture linked to the presence of one’s own body and the bodies of others.” People moved from one social setting to another: school to office to home to church. Each performance was sequential, bounded in time and space. Between these performances came “intervals of solitude” that provided “respites from social pressures, opportunities to relax and attend to one’s own inner voice.”
This separation between social situations acted as what communication professor Joshua Meyrowitz called “a psycho-social shock absorber” in his 1985 book No Sense of Place. It gave people control over “the flow of our actions and emotions” because they weren’t responding to many different situations with many different sets of people all at once.
But digital media (including online education) has changed everything. As Carr puts it, “The social and the real have parted ways.” Social situations now “exist everywhere all at once. We move between them with a tap on a screen, a flick of a finger.” There’s no offstage anymore, no place insulated from communication and its demands. The old architecture of walls and doors, mornings and afternoons and evenings, has collapsed.
This applies directly to how we learn. Without physical boundaries and natural intervals, we struggle to shift cleanly between different types of mental work. The solution requires intentionality. You need to create artificial boundaries where natural ones used to exist. Same chair, same time, same ritual. Your brain needs these signals to know when it’s time to focus.
I’m not talking about elaborate setups. I’m talking about consistency. The same coffee mug. The same playlist. The same ten minutes of preparation before you open your laptop. Simply acknowledging these difficulties can help prepare your mind and body to focus.
Online education offers incredible flexibility, but flexibility without structure becomes chaos. You can study anywhere, anytime, but that doesn’t mean you should.
Give your mind what it’s looking for: clear signals that it’s time to study. With continued discipline, the rest will follow more easily. The transition to “student mode” will have less resistance, and you’ll save time in the long run.
Program News: Logos Max and Textbook
One of the things I’m most excited about this fall is our new partnership with Logos. This investment is designed to serve you both now and in the years to come.
Our goal is not only to relieve the financial burden of purchasing textbooks each semester, but also to remove the stress of making sure you have the right materials when your classes begin. Even more importantly, we want to equip you with resources that will support your ministry long after seminary.
I know some of you may still prefer to read a physical book during the course, and that’s completely fine. But with Logos, you will have full digital access to your textbooks for reading, research, writing, and future ministry needs.
For example, maybe two years from now, you are preparing a teaching series on missions. You remember reading something helpful in one of your classes but can’t recall where. Instead of searching through old files or notes, you open Logos and search across all your textbooks. Everything is right there.
This is not just a benefit for this semester. It is a long-term investment in your calling and in your faithfulness to God’s Word.
Logos Max Access: Last week, I sent out a couple of emails with instructions for activating your free Logos Max subscription. If you are currently an active student (which means you have taken a master’s-level course for credit within the past 32 weeks), you now have access. If you missed those emails, you can follow the activation steps here: https://online.sbts.edu/blog/logos-max
Free Textbooks in Logos: This week, I will be sending an email about accessing your course textbooks through Logos. Starting this fall, textbooks will be provided to you at no cost for each course you are enrolled in. Shortly after the course begins, the textbooks will be added to your Logos account and will be yours to keep permanently. Before that, you’ll still have full access to them on a day-to-day basis.
Quick Reference of Upcoming Term Dates:
Current Week: Summer, Week 7 (July 14–20)
Fall 1 Term Begins: August 4, 2025
Fall 2 Term Begins: October 6, 2025
Register for Courses →
Register for Fall Experiential Modulars →
Thanks for reading! I’ll check in next Monday. You can browse past emails in thearchiveor exploreCourse Snapshotsto find textbooks, course descriptions, and details about what we offer online.
