What are the main decisions relating to production and distribution?

Since distance education depends heavily on both recorded and interactive technologies, decisions relating to the production and distribution of materials are extremely important. Management must decide which materials to produce, using which media. It must deal with such matters as copyright clearance, developmental testing, and scheduling issues. And it must decide where to store materials awaiting distribution and in what quantities-a significant decision when dealing with printed or recorded materials for as many as 100,000 students.

One of the most important issues is determining what content has sufficient shelf life to be distributed in video or text, and what may be more safely communicated in real time, or less permanent (and less costly) media.

Other issues include deciding how long the shelf life is likely to be and thus when the course will need to be redesigned, how many copies of each item to produce, what languages to use, where to produce the item, and when and how often to broadcast.