Balancing the multimedia mix in a large scale distance education course

We describe our experience in deploying the full range of multimedia for a large scale distance education course enrolling over 5000 mature students per year and raise issues about how to effectively balance the types of media. The course introduces computing to both computing majors and non-majors. It represents a radical change in the curriculum, taking a fully object-oriented approach to software development, for example, teaching programming using Smalltalk. The course is large (one sixth of a degree) and the design of materials for the innovative syllabus required experimentation and frequent rebalancing the use of various media. This paper relates the experiences and reflects on the issues encountered.