Online Learning at EMS

Eastern Mennonite Seminary has been approved by the Association of Theological Schools to offer our fully accredited degree programs in on-campus and online formats—including fully online graduate certificates as well as master’s and doctoral degrees.

In courses for our graduate certificates and master’s degree programs, Hybrid-Flexible (or HyFlex) is the most common teaching and learning modality at Eastern Mennonite Seminary. This means EMS offers multiple participation options for most courses (specifically, on campus and synchronous online), and students select one option for each course when they enroll for the semester and attend primarily in that modality throughout the term. With courses running in on campus and online at the same time, however, students have some flexibility to join online for a session (for example, when traveling or caring for a loved one) or catch up asynchronously when the instructor records the class session.

The Doctor of Ministry in Peacemaking and Social Change program is made up of all new, fully asynchronous online courses taught by full-time faculty at Eastern Mennonite Seminary. In the run-up to this program’s launch, our faculty engaged online education specialists to build the capacity to open spaces for teaching and learning that make good use of the best digital tools (like VoiceThread and Perusall) available for higher learning and community building. This is not self-paced study. DMin students take one course at a time, and the flexibility of asynchronous work allows them to complete their work week by week on a timetable that complements their ministry work.