1        Santosh Panda and Suresh Garg  Whether universities teach at a distance or adopt online teaching, the most crucial foundation and pre-requisites to their operation are the learning packages. An equivalency to classroom teaching (the foremost role of the teacher) at the open universities is undoubtedly writing or development of (or teaching through) self-learning materials (SLMs); all other tasks centre around this main task. In tele-teaching for instance in the United States, the role combines both material development and online teaching (Gunawardena, 1992; Olcott and Wright, 1995). For single-mode open universities, distance teaching through pre-produced SLMs has been the major task; and the Course Team approach to material development, pioneered by the British Open University, has invariably been adopted by many open universities and distance teaching institutions (DTIs) in both developed and developing countries (Inglis, 1996). From the institution’s point of view, the considerations of cost, time, constraints and quality output are crucial; and for the students, quality and learning effectiveness of the materials and responsiveness of learner support services are of utmost importance. In this chapter, we describe briefly some of the course development models generally used by DTIs, and concentrate more on analysis of some of the selected models of material development in the distance education system in India - dual-mode university Distance Education Institutes (DEIs), State Open Universities (SOUs), and the National Open University - which is the second largest system of open learning in the world with about four million cumulative and about one million annual enrolment.    A variety of course development models have been adopted by distance teaching universities. The most commonly adopted one is the Course Team (CT) model, followed at the Open University (UK), Athabasca University (Canada) and Deakin University (Australia). The course team model comprises academics (subject experts), radio and TV producers, educational technologists, editors, graphic designers, counsellors, student representatives, and course chairperson with varying levels of responsibilities. Because of the representation and active involvement of different categories of experts, the quality of materials thus produced are normally high. But one of the serious criticisms of this model is that it takes too long (two to three years) to produce a course, thereby making it cost-intensive and at times obsolete before being printed. Universidad Estatal a Distancia, Costa Rica follows the Author-Contract Model (ACM); the FernUniversität, Germany, also follows the ACM, with the difference that an individual teacher takes up the overall responsibility of course development. Everyman’s University of Israel also works with the same model (Rumble and Harry, 1982). Lockwood (1992, 1993, 1994) has discussed four course production models, viz. personalised training, workshop generated, text transformation, and wrap around which are considerably different from the original CT model. These are described briefly as follows: Personalised Training In this model authors are equipped with skills and techniques that they need to use exactly at the time they decide to plan and produce self instructional materials (Lockwood, 1994). This method is suitable for producing self-instructional materials in a shorter time and with people having no previous experience in this area. * In S. Garg et al (Eds.) (2006) Four Decades of Distance Education in India: Reflections on Policy and Practice. New Delhi: Viva Books.