As a regional institution serving the needs of 11 different island nations of the South West Pacific, the University of the South Pacific (USP) is, along with its on-campus face-to-face teaching activity, deeply committed to and reliant on distance study methods. Both of these activities at the university are the principal responsibility of a single body of teaching staff. This investigation, through the means of a structured questionnaire, studied the involvement of members of the university's teaching staff in instructional materials development for distance study. It inquired into the time they spent on such activity, their levels of satisfaction with the materials they produced, their preferences with regard to teaching and instructional materials development strategies, and their views on how the process of instructional development at the university could be improved. Responses revealed a rather unsatisfactory picture with requests for more time for materials development, better coordination and planning, greater consultation among colleagues, and adequate support services in instructional materials development for distance study. There was concern and consensus about the need for instructional materials developers to be adequately familiar with the USP region and the students for whom the materials are intended. Some respondents suggested that course writers, prior to developing instructional materials, be allowed to spend time in the region becoming familiar with the local learning context. Among the less frequently mentioned suggestions was that prospective course writers be sent abroad for short-term training courses in distance education and instructional materials development for distance teaching. (Author/GL)