| by Sierra Abukins

News Stories

Learning online
The new online degree allows students to balance their education, work, and family. (Credit: Oleksandr Pidvalnyi from Pixabay )

Every teacher knows that as the world changes, so too will their curriculum.

These days, it is a rare subject that doesn’t require frequent revision, especially at a professionally focused graduate school like the Middlebury Institute.

Over the past year, the TESOL faculty have taken on a bolder and more holistic set of changes—updating the online Master of Arts in TESOL to meet the needs of the 21st-century learner. We caught up with Program Chair Jason Martel to learn more.

What’s new and different?

Our goal was making sure that our curriculum is optimized for the student today—someone who wants to access a Middlebury education from anywhere in the world while balancing work and family.

We’ve achieved that through the following:

  • Reducing the online tuition rate to $850 per credit, for a total of $25,500 for the degree.
  • Moving from semester-long to seven-week courses that students take one at a time so they can focus deeply on one subject area.
  • Creating a streamlined set of 10 courses that can be completed in 20 months.
  • Updating the curriculum to reflect the latest scholarship in the field, including around social action and access, with assignments designed for working educators.

Many of our students take what they learn and immediately put it to work in their classrooms. We have students in our program living everywhere from Mexico to China.

What is driving the these updates?

Our core goal was to meet the needs of students. However, this process also provided a wonderful opportunity for curricular updates. As we updated the required courses, we worked to think holistically across the curriculum and make systematic updates in response to new initiatives and scholarship in the field of applied linguistics.

We are committed to a practice-based approach to language teacher education, meaning our courses ask students to regularly design curricular artifacts and practice teaching techniques instead of simply talking about teaching. We don’t believe in busywork. I’m gratified to hear students tell me that they’re able to use their schoolwork on the job, building up their own resources and portfolios that they can take with them throughout their careers.

We don’t believe in busywork. I’m gratified to hear students tell me that they’re able to use their schoolwork on the job, building up their own resources and portfolios that they can take with them throughout their careers.
— Jason Martel, Chair, TESOL

How will the updates benefit the next generation of students?

The new curriculum provides students a toolbox for teaching in a multimodal world, which includes traditional face-to-face learning as well as hybrid and asynchronous learning. Since the pandemic, the teaching world has changed substantially, and we want our students to be prepared for a variety of situations they may encounter in their professional lives. 

It also allows students who are already in the classroom to implement novel techniques into their teaching immediately and to get feedback from experts on improving their performance. For instance, our students might video themselves teaching and receive feedback on how they’re putting techniques and theory into practice.

What are you most excited about?

I’m most excited about the way in which the new curriculum emphasizes social action and access. These concepts are addressed most deeply in the Inclusive & Intercultural Teaching Practices and Social Change & Advocacy Courses, but also permeate the entire curriculum. For example, in the Multimodal Curriculum Design course, students are encouraged to think about ways in which justice figures in writing learning goals, selecting authentic texts, and designing real-world performance tasks.

For More Information

Online Master of Arts in TESOL