Basically, the infrastructure of the program is built around individual faculty Web pages, news groups, and a Web-based service called Tapped InTM, which is multi-user virtual environment designed to support large numbers of education professionals in a single virtual place (more on this later).

Margaret Riel, visiting professor in the MAET program, adds that course management systems are typically built around the notion of a teacher-controlled environment where students have very structured access and control of the learning environment. Thus, according to Riel, a typical CMS is somewhat limited in its ability to foster community interaction and consequently not necessary in the MAET program, which has a very strong learner-community-building cohort focus.

Such rationalization, in addition a number of other important factors, is what makes Pepperdine’s MAET program quite innovative and distinctive.

For instance, the term used for cohort in the MAET program is "cadre." Since the 13-month/30-unit program began in the summer of 1998, five cadres, one for each complete 13-month term, have been created. The first 1998-99 cadre enrolled 22 students. The second 1999-00 cadre enrolled 59 students, and currently there are 75 students enrolled in the 2002-03 cadre. A total of 210 students have completed the MAET program, for a 96% completion rate.

"We’ve made it financially viable for the university," says Polin, adding that the program has a selective admission process. For example, prospective students must be professionals with at least three years experience in educational settings. Plus, all applicants are interviewed either by phone or face-to-face, typically at educational conferences, before being accepted. "We make sure they are really clear on what it is going to be like and that they are really committed and not just looking to buy a degree.

"We get people from corporations and increasingly from higher education," Polin continues. "People are coming in that are being pressed by their universities to go online." However, the predominant student demographic are people from K-12, with a mix of public and private school teachers and technology coordinators, school district curriculum and professional development people, and local educational agency (LEA) people.

As noted on the MAET Web site, the program covers two themes: learning and leadership. "Students learn how technology can support innovative ideas in learning environments - constructivism, alternate assessment, collaboration, and community - by experiencing them directly, as learners in real and virtual classrooms. The program also prepares students to lead others, develop colleagues, manage resources, make technology decisions, and secure project funding."

Completing the program includes attending three five-day, face-to-face sessions, the first being a "VirtCamp," which is described as "a pre-session designed for team building, learning to use online technologies, and establishing the philosophical foundations for distributed learning within an online community of practice." Under this model, the entire cadre goes through all course work together. Polin notes that the VirtCamp is structured in a way to ultimately establish a solid group bond that will stay intact for 13 months.

The second face-to-face session, held midway through the program, is conducted at a national technology conference, such as the annual Florida Educational Technology Conference (FETC). "We help them figure out how it is you go about being engaged in an educational conference," says Riel.

The third face-to-face session, held at the end of the program, is when each student presents a public exhibition covering the results of their Action Research Project (ARP), which is a culmination of an "idea, issue, or topic in their workplace that they want to use as the grounding for all their course work" over the duration of the 13-month curriculum, says Polin. "When they undertake an ARP, they have to do some sort of intervention and study and tweak it. . ."

Some of the topics of interest students have worked on include faculty development, parental involvement in low-income schools, support for technology coordinators, improving classroom instruction and building collaborations between lab coordinators and teachers. The ARPs "make it possible for people to go through a master’s program and be fully employed, because their work in real life becomes part of their work in the program," says Polin. "It also helps students move theory out of the classroom and into the workplace. This has been a real powerful piece of the curriculum."

In between the face-to-face sessions students move through the entire program via a variety of online learning environments. Syllabi are posted on faculty-made Web sites, and class threaded discussions are conducted inside newsgroups created by faculty and hosted on a Pepperdine server. But the most innovative online environment is the use of the Tapped In Web-based service for conducting both synchronous and asynchronous class meetings that serve as a combination of social and intellectual functions inside the MAET program.

Tapped In is a research and development project operated by SRI International, a non-profit research institute based in Menlo Park, CA. According to Mark Schlager, SRI associate director of learning communities, it’s the longest-running online community of K-12 education professionals in the world, having started in 1995. With Tapped In, the face-to-face, informal, collegial aspects of learning are replicated inside a virtual environment. "We have been able to accomplish things that haven’t been accomplished in other online venues," says Schlager.

Tapped In currently has about 15,000 individual members who can utilize many of its online services for free. However, Pepperdine, as well as a number of other schools and organizations such as Azusa Pacific University and the Los Angeles County Office of Education, contract with SRI for expanded access to an enhanced version of the Tapped In platform. In this learning-community environment Pepperdine University maintains a 12-story virtual campus building that houses classrooms, student and faculty offices, as well as the hallways, elevators, entrances and other rooms one might find in a high-rise campus building. "Tapped In is the dorm room, the cafeteria, the library and other aspects of the campus," says Schlager.

"The main function of Tapped In is really to help the group feel like they had a face-to-face meeting," adds Riel, who is also a senior researcher for SRI. A number of features help facilitate this kind of unique online-learner-community-building environment. For example, as noted on the Tapped In Web site, users can hold private meetings, lock their virtual offices, remodel them by adding furniture or other objects, lock objects down so others can’t walk off with them, and store personal resources like notes and Web links.

For holding typically drab text-based online discussions, Tapped In has features that can enhance the environment, such as cartoon-like bubbles that are used for describing a user’s thoughts. "If I’m worried about the way a conversation is going I can let students know what’s on my mind without being officially part of the conversation," says Riel. Additionally, a whisper function allows users to say something to a specific individual(s) that is off the record. Another function allows users to describe their emotions. Users can also enter a chat room with a visible virtual tape recorder that records discussion transcripts that are e-mailed to them after departing from the room.

"The students get really skillful at negotiating interaction in this environment," says Riel. "It is a different way to do group discussions that can be very effective. It is a playful environment where people can weave in and out of humor and education content in interesting ways. It is not as serious a discussion as you might have inside a [physical] class, but often the humor ends up building ideas in interesting ways. So it is a different mix of being able to use words and word pictures creatively and twisting them to come back to the content you are working on."

After experiencing the culmination of building a practical ARP, taking part in numerous community-enhancing discussions within Tapped-In, and actively participating in three dynamic face-to-face group sessions, the students eventually leave the program energized, says Polin. However, it’s not unusual for some of them to suddenly feel like they are living "sequestered lives," back at their places of work. "The people we get [in the program] tend to be the movers and shakers in the workplaces." As change agents, the challenge of wining over converts to new educational-technology-enhanced practices can be one filled with frustration. Consequently, the MAET program is starting to develop a new course on organization strategies and techniques. "We thought an important thing to do would be to help them learn how to build coalitions in the workplace," Polin concludes. "So we are adding a course about coalition building and organization."