Launched in the Fall of 2000, MTL started with three courses and 27 enrollments. Today it has ten courses and about 160 enrollments. By next year, the program is slated to offer 30 online courses designed specifically for online MTL students, says MTL Project Coordinator Lisa Saunders, who is also a faculty member and course developer.

"We wanted to meet a need for teachers who did not simply want another curriculum in instruction," says Saunders. "These are people who want to take on more leadership roles, be on committees, be department chairs, but do not have an interest in being a principal."

Shari McCurdy is an adjunct faculty member in MTL who also doubles and triples as a web developer and faculty trainer through the UIS Office of Technology-Enhanced Learning (OTEL). McCurdy teaches EDU 547, a Technology in the Curriculum course, which, according to her syllabus, examines Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) and International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) technology standards for teachers and teacher educators. Topics include software applications and using the Internet in the classroom, with the goal of the course centered around integrating technology into "educational situations."

Part of that goal includes showing these potential leaders how to use technology to reach out to their local communities, says McCurdy, who is a strong advocate of having K-12 students and teachers work on community-based projects that fulfill a specific purpose. One example of this is to have students and teachers work with their local libraries to create informative presentations and displays that are partially or wholly developed with the help of educational technology tools and resources. Local residents, in turn, will benefit from such a collaboration and see their tax dollars at work.

Saunders and McCurdy are also developing two new online technology-related courses they feel are absolutely necessary. Both reflect many of today’s persistent challenges concerning K-12 educational technology integration. One is a basic technology course, and the other is a "strategies" course.

"We have teachers who come into the program, and the only thing they have done online is send out e-mails," says Saunders. They are "overwhelmed" with the technology learning part of the EDU 547 class, and "they need a lot of help." The basic technology class to address this issue will become part of the program this summer.

The strategies course tackles such issues as how to get your school or district up to speed and more user friendly technologically. For instance, McCurdy explains how many K-12 teachers today "have no control over their computers. They cannot even download software. Their computers are so tightly tied down for security reasons that they can’t do anything. Everybody talks about the Internet and how you can download this program and that program, but what happens if you are a classroom where the administration has you boxed in? It’s very common. If you are in that kind of situation you need some strategies [to overcome such challenges]."

For the Spring 2003 semester, MTL has also launched a ten-hour series of online courses coined Legal Aspects of the Educational Workplace. "These courses are a unique collaboration with one of the teacher’s union, and they are going to be counted toward the MTL degree," says Saunders. "They are open to teachers and administrators, and I would love to see school board members enroll too."