17 Chapter 3 Using eCollege to Facilitate Learning, Provide for Program Coherence, Manage Accountability Innovations, and Ensure the Evolution of a Principal Licensure Program Connie Fulmer My love affair with online learning started at Northern Illinois University (NIU) when an email for professional development landed in my inbox with an opportunity for curriculum enhancement and how to hang it on the Web. The specific curricular enhance was writing across the curriculum, but it was the Web part that caught by eye. I signed up and two weeks later I had mastered some basic HTML and was able to create web pages to support my leadership classes at NIU. With these newfound skills, I set about the task of creating an online environment intended to support the learning activities in my courses. I uploaded specific course information that included: (a) the official course description, (b) information about me as the instructor, (c) course objectives and assignments, (d) reading assignments for each class meeting, (e) structural outline notes for each reading assignment, (f) a glossary of terms specific to this course for students to add definitions during the course, and (g) a clickable calendar. Lost in this work, I spent hours in these labor-of-love activities using technology to enhance my teaching repertoire. Later when I joined the Administrative Leadership and Policy Studies (ALPS) faculty at the University of Colorado Denver, we began using Colorado Education Online (CEO), powered by the FirstClass system, to deliver our distance-learning programs. By creatively using folders and icons, we were able to create an environment where students could find assignments, upload letters of introduction, and other assignments as needed. Even though CEO was primarily an email system, it provided a commons area where we could create folders for anyone to access. We soon learned that we could create one folder for the entire program, and within that one program folder we could add a folder for each of the learning domains (which for the Principal program was four domains). This simple common folder structure provided students continuity and structure as they proceed thorough our intensive 32 credit-hour principal licensure program. Within each of the four domain folders, faculty added folders with assignments, assessments, reading lists and other course activities and strategies. We also added a folder for the clinical-practice element of our program. While CEO was not designed to host online courses, it did a great job and had some special features. For instance, you could create work in an email message and send it directly to the appropriate program folder. However, over time, faculty were encouraged to make the switch to eCollege. At first, we were skeptical. We questioned whether or not eCollege could meet the needs of our already strong teaching and learning culture. We also questioned whether eCollege would enable us to transfer the nested folder structure for our program. Finally, we questioned whether eCollege would enable us the ability to give faculty and students access to course shells beyond the traditional single semester time frame (e.g., ALPS cohorts require a four-semester time frame for completion) as well after the end of a particular cohort. We found out that eCollege could meet all of our needs so,