MEAD managing education with teachers at a distance

The MEAD project is aimed at the challenge of getting competent teachers in a rapidly changing area such as computer science which for many institutions is a nontrivial task. Involving teachers at remote institutions might be a solution to this problem. There are, however, many obstacles with doing so, and this paper looks into the teacher aspect of being involved from a remote place in a course, as well as to present the open ended group project (OEGP) as a suitable education format for such a situation. The first step in this project has been to investigate properties of OEGPs and to see if the concept will fit with the intention of the MEAD project. Some general aspects of OEGPs that are deemed especially promising are presented, many of them based on Runes tone which is an OEGP where experience of involving nonlocal teachers has been gained. The IT project semester is an instance of a course that is run with a nonlocal teacher. Planning and initial observations from this course are presented.