Spanish UBIS―One More Step in the Expansion of the Urantia Book Internet School

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By Olga López, Associate Trustee, Barcelona, Spain

The Urantia Book Internet School (UBIS) is an educational initiative of Urantia Foundation with more than ten years of activity. Since its implementation, all of its courses have been given in English. But one of the main goals is to fully internationalize UBIS, so that many more students can take courses in their native language.

The Spanish readership has been growing dramatically; so it seemed natural to expand UBIS to offer courses in Spanish. After a long period of training and preparation, which included updating the UBIS website, the first official course in Spanish was given in January 2012. I served as the teacher-facilitator. This first course was titled “Evolutionary Religion vs. Revealed Religion, A Comparative Study.” Twenty-one people from seven different countries participated. The second course in Spanish was given in April by Virginia (Ginger) Heller, a qualified teacher-facilitator living in Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA. Ginger speaks Spanish. Her course was titled “A Leap of Faith: From Here to Eternity.” This class had twenty-one people from ten countries. In both courses, there were many more applicants than places. This shows the great demand for Urantia Book courses among the Spanish-speaking readership.

The first requirement to become a teacher-facilitator―is to take two UBIS courses as a student. The next requirement is to organize a teacher-training class to train more teachers. The first teacher’s training class in Spanish was held from July 2 to August 5, 2012. It was a five-week course; I taught it with the help and support of Polly Friedman who has given previous teacher-training courses in English. We had seven UBIS students from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Dominican Republic, and Spain. All of them are enthusiastic about the UBIS project, and I’m fully confident that they will become excellent teacher-facilitators.

Our goal for 2013 is to offer two courses in Spanish per semester; so we need to have at least six teacher-facilitators to achieve this goal. Little by little, step by step, we plan to develop a core of Spanish-speaking teacher-facilitators in order to offer as many courses in Spanish at the same level of excellence as we do in English. I am convinced we shall succeed for the sake of the spiritual advancement of our planet!