Curriculum development for distance education (DE) practitioners is more and more focusing on
practical requirements and competence development. Delphi and DACUM methods have been
used at some universities. However, in the competency-based development area, these methods
have been taken over by professional-task-based development in the last decade, which has not
been applied in the open and distance education area so far. Is the professional-task-based
curriculum development approach suitable for open and distance education? This study aims to
develop a Master Degree curriculum for DE practitioners in China based on professional tasks.
Design-based research (DBR) was used and two cycles of DBR were conducted. Interviews and
observations were used to collect data. In the first round of DBR, the authors find that
professional-task-based development is feasible and could direct more closely to practical
requirements of competencies, and that meanwhile, this approach has some disadvantages and
limitations. In the second round of DBR, the approach was revised and results showed that the
revised approach was much more suitable and reasonable for DE practitioners. Results of this
study include: 1) professional-task based curricula for DE practitioners in China; 2) a curriculum
development approach for open and distance education revised from professional-task-based
development.