Distributed Software Development course: Students' and teachers' perspectives

Students and teachers do not necessarily have the same understanding of a course - of the purpose, the objective, and in particular of the course elements - the way the course is performed, the examination procedure, and similar. In distributed-development courses, in which students and teachers are dispersed over different locations, this difference can be larger than in “ordinary” courses, but also less visible, due to limited communication. In this paper we discuss these different perspectives, their rationales, possible consequences on the course performance and on the result, as well as lessons learned from students' feedback.