Development Team (2:37)

Irani: Having a team involved in a distance education course is really crucial. It takes a lot of time to develop a course, and if one person were to invest all of his time, it would be quite lengthy. Using the rule of thumb of 12 to 18 months to develop a course, is quite literally true. I think another reason to have a team together is that you get different perspectives. You have not only you but others on the team who can look at something and say, "You know, I don't think that was really clear." Or, "Why don't we try using a chat or try something else?" You get more of ideas and can bounce more things off of other members of the team, and other members may have special expertise. In the course that I did, we used Flash animation, digital video, Web forums. And there are probably not a lot of people who are experts in all of those things. Having team members who were an expert in their particular field, I think, enhanced the final product.

Rudd: From the instructor's standpoint, it's critical to have a team of people to help out with a course like this. A lot of work goes into developing a quality distance education course, and having support is absolutely necessary to make this run well.  A faculty member can't know everything necessary to develop a distance education course, so having a team of people to help develop a course is pretty critical.

Hightower: The idea of having a nine- or 10-person team is wonderful. Having someone only working with the Web section, a person who deals only with video interaction, and someone with the videoconferencing. In our shop, we just don't have that many people. We are limited on our staff. So sometimes, we may have two or three people working on a course. Sometimes, just me, just one person. So in that case, we try to do as much as we can. We have to learn all different types of technology. Originally, I was just working with videoconferencing, but as time went on, now I'm working with Web site design and with Flash, because that's what people want now, animation of demonstrations. So you have to become a jack of all trades. You have to know about video, and Web and videoconferencing. And I think it's made us better. We can turn around courses a lot quicker now, because we can all do everything.