Many universities are now investigating the use of distance, or distributed education due to many perceived benefits over traditional classroom education. These perceived benefits include: flexibility with student location, ease of program scalability, and (many times erroneously) believing that it is at a lower cost. However, successful development of courses for distance delivery is not as simple as turning on a video camera and placing recordings on the web. Course content developers, distance education instructors (not always the same people as the developers) and support staff must be aware of these differences between on campus and distance delivery in areas such as technology support, appropriate assessment techniques, classroom management and communication with and between students. This handbook provides the current methodology and recommendations for successful course development/delivery used for the Carnegie Mellon Masters of Software Engineering ten year old distance program.

25 pages

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