The Universal House of Justice has stressed the importance of a sequence of courses in preparing the friends for the expansion and consolidation work:
... it may be timely for you to consider introducing another component into your institute program. Unlike the courses designed for deepening the generality of the believers, this component would be concerned with helping a certain percentage of the friends, especially young people with some formal education, enhance their capacity to perform the tasks associated with an accelerated process of expansion and consolidation. It would entail choosing a sequence of courses which, building on one another, gradually endow the students with the knowledge, skills and qualities needed to serve the Faith with increasing effectiveness.
Great strides have been made in involving the friends in training institute courses, but more attention needs to be given to ensure that they systematically proceed through a sequence of courses.
Once the sequence has been selected, a steadily increasing number of believers are recruited to enter the first basic course, and relatively significant percentages are then helped to reach higher and higher courses, enhancing thereby their capacity for service.
(International Teaching Centre, 2000 Feb, Training Institutes and Systematic Growth)
Ruhi
As part of its mandate to assess institute curricula that are available in the Baha'i world, the International Teaching Centre has found the Ruhi Institute materials to be particularly appropriate. Many national communities are using the Ruhi Institute curriculum either as the focus of their training institute or as one of its tracks of study.
The Ruhi Institute curriculum had been tested and adapted over many years. It has enabled the friends in different countries to get the institute system up and running in a short time. Rather than having the participants be passive listeners to a wide array of unconnected talks, the Ruhi Institute materials seek to engage the friends fully in the process of learning. Baha'is with diverse cultural and educational backgrounds have found the curriculum's deceptively simple approach, based heavily on connecting the believers to the Creative Word, both appealing and empowering.
Even in those countries where the Ruhi Institute materials have been chosen as the main curriculum or as one of the institute tracks, modifications and adaptations for local conditions have occasionally been made. In a few countries a beginning course has been developed for new believers which precedes Book 1. In some areas the Ruhi Institute books have been supplemented with other materials to suit the local requirements. Over time, through systematic educational experience, other sequential curricula will be developed in various parts of the world that display the same coherence that the Ruhi Institute materials have achieved but are derived from the experience of different national communities.
(International Teaching Centre, 2000 Feb, Training Institutes and Systematic Growth, p. 6)
Training Institutes
The purpose of training institutes was clarified and elaborated in the April 1998 publication entitled "Training Institutes," a document prepared for and approved by the Universal House of Justice. On the basis of this elucidation of the institute process, national communities began to refocus their efforts, emphasizing a sequence of courses that would create capacity and commitment on the part of the friends to carry out acts of service.
(International Teaching Centre, 2000 Feb, Training Institutes and Systematic Growth)
An important point to bear in mind is that these study groups are not local deepening classes or local institutes, but elements of a system of distance-education administered by a national or regional institute. The concept of "local institutes" created some confusion at the beginning of the Four Year Plan, and the House of Justice offered the following clarification:
For the establishment of a training institute to be a viable and worthwhile enterprise, it would clearly have to serve an area with a reasonably large number of believers. Moreover, the development of effective curricula to raise up human resources to carry forward the process of entry by troops is not, in reality, a task that small local Baha'i communities can undertake. Generally speaking, the resources of a national community, or at least a sizeable region, need to be drawn upon in devising well-organized, formally conducted programmes. Although it is likely that as local communities grow, there will be those large enough to have their own independent institutes, at this point, such institutes run the danger, as you have surmised, of turning into deepening classes, which are, of course, of critical importance themselves and an activity every local community should carry out.
This does not mean, however, that the courses of a national or regional institute would not be offered at the local level. In fact, a significant percentage of the national and regional institutes emerging around the world are organizing their programmes in such a way that many of their courses are conducted in local communities by believers trained as teachers or facilitators.
(Commissioned by The Universal House of Justice, 1998 Apr, Training Institutes)
... it may be timely for you to consider introducing another component into your institute program. Unlike the courses designed for deepening the generality of the believers, this component would be concerned with helping a certain percentage of the friends, especially young people with some formal education, enhance their capacity to perform the tasks associated with an accelerated process of expansion and consolidation. It would entail choosing a sequence of courses which, building on one another, gradually endow the students with the knowledge, skills and qualities needed to serve the Faith with increasing effectiveness.
