Have you tried defining the bean at the beginning of the page. Something like
<bean
efine id="courseList" name="courseList" type="java.util.Collection" scope="request"/>
or whatever the type is. I am doing the exact same thing you are and it works for me. It is not a struts related problem as far as I can tell. If you set the attribute within the Action servlet like request.setAttribute ("courseList", courseList); you should be able to access it even within a simple servlet.
--ignore if you have already tried this.
