What management issues affect course creation?

Courses are produced at all levels of distance education. In a mixed-mode institution, such as a conventional American university, a graduate course is likely to involve about 150 hours of study and about 45 to 50 hours of direct contact between instructor and students. The distance education course, usually taught by teleconferencing, will be of the same duration. At the Open University (UK)-a single-mode distance education institution-a course is about 450 hours of study, with little or no direct, face-to-face contact between instructor and learners. But in all cases a course will have learning objectives, one or more teachers, a medium of communication, and content or subject matter.

A distance education institution must have a system in place for deciding which courses to produce in a given year. Design has to be managed, either by single instructors, as is common in mixed-mode institutions, or by course teams, as in single-mode institutions.

One decision relating to course creation might be to purchase materials prepared by other institutions as an alternative to producing them in-house.