ABSTRACT
This chapter is not about how to port a successful graduate program online, although that describes the initial intent behind the “substantive change” proposal sent to the Western Accreditation of Schools and Colleges, to allow the graduate school to move the 15-year-old master of arts in educational technology to an online format and have it remain accredited. This chapter is not about how to adapt instruction or curriculum to take advantage of the affordances of network software applications, although that is exactly what the graduate school hoped to do. This chapter is about how a particular theory of learning underlying the redesign of the program as a specifically online program led to changes in curriculum and pedagogy. More important, it is about how those changes were possible largely because the program was online. In other words, the features of the tools and the elements of the pedagogical model created a synergy that transformed the program for the better.
