Teaching and learning software engineering have been recognized as important challenges for computer science students and instructors. These challenges become stronger if we consider the distributed software development scenario that is gaining space everyday into the software industry. In order to help address this challenge, this article introduces a Collaborative and Distributed Learning Activity (CODILA). This collaborative activity helps students to reach the professional skills required in the professional work, and instructors to perform such transfer process. The paper also presents and discusses the obtained results from a particular CODILA, which address the challenge of designing a software architecture of a communication infrastructure in a distributed way. Six Latin American universities participated in the activity. The obtained results were satisfactory and indicate these types of experiences can be used to address the stated challenges. © 2011 IEEE.