IN Digestion

I believe that Arees is the only real shot an American Muslim has to become a serious student of knowledge. Of course, most who sign up, or even finish will not retain what they learn, or do anything of value with their education — but, none the less, there is always the possibility that just one person may actually move on and do something amazing with their life, so I am very excited to be a part of it.

Shaikh Isam spends nearly thirty hours of each week physically teaching (countless other hours are spent in preperation, grading, e-mails, answering questions, etc.). For any given class, two people from a pool of three (Shahada, Khalil, and Hani) have to physically be in each class to

• Broadcast it
• Provide Techincal Support
• Tape it to Produce VIDEO / DVD
• Record the Audio.

It is quite a lot of work on all parties involved, and I had assumed everyone, most of all Shaikh Isam welcomed the summer as an opportunity for a much deserved break. So it was very surprising when he announced his plans for a Summer Arees Semester! However shortly after, we realized that the Summer Classes would be crucial if we wanted to maintain the level of quality we were after for the Arees Online, and Arees on Demand services.

I pushed for us to tape each class, though nearly everyone objected to taping both on weekdays and weekends. We made many mistakes, learned from them, refined our system, and now I am stoked that we have the ability to be able to produce a finished product at the end of each day. It did however, take us over 200 man hours and $30,000 to get it right - but, in the end - we have a final product which we are all proud of. The sad thing is even though we taped each class of the first semester (and it was a very painful process to record high quality audio, whatever video we could get, and the broadcasts, in the end (and we knew it all along), it just was not good enough. It was not up to a level of quality that we are happy with. Towards the last few weeks, we finally got the production system working the way we want. I will put up an entire class to show a sample of what one of the final products will look like. I would however like to point out, that it is still years ahead of anything else that is on the market! This summer program will allow us to re-capture the first semester from the beginning, and that’s the really exciting part for me.