"Does it cost less to design and develop online teaching and learning today than it did a few years ago? Are the categories of cost different today from the past and from what the costs might be in the future? The costs of developing online programs are significant, yet there are few resources to help planners. Here, Judith Boettcher proposes a few guidelines for predicting the costs involved in the design and development of online instruction.
Five or more years ago, projects for the design and development of online instruction included costs for basics such as faculty hardware and software, instructional programmers, and other campus infrastructure and applications that are now, hopefully, in place. In the early years, the environment and applications for an online course often had to be designed and built from scratch, line of programming code by line of programming code. In addition to these costs, there were the familiar costs of faculty professional development time and many expenses associated with content research, selection, capture, analysis, and digitization.
Much of our current infrastructure now includes learning management systems, faculty and student support personnel, and content licensing. That means the instructional costs for teaching and learning online are distributed more broadly across the campus community. This leads us to Rule of Thumb #1.
Rule of Thumb #1: A Learning Management System Reduces Costs for Design, Development, and Delivery-Use an LMS
The campus digital plant-the online system analogous to our campus physical plant-is here. With an LMS, faculty have an entire online teaching and learning classroom, campus resource, and conference center suite at their disposal. A campus infrastructure that provides a learning management system (LMS) for their faculty and students provides not only the four virtual walls of a classroom-the course Web site-but also places for gathering, discussing, and thinking that students can use for forums, student discussion areas of all types, faculty office meeting spaces, project working space, presentations, and virtually infinite databases and libraries of content. The LMS systems available today offer flexible environments that readily and easily support the three dialogues for effective teaching and learning: faculty-to-student dialogue, peer dialogue, and student-to-resources dialogue.
It bears repeating-the first rule of thumb is to use an LMS. Whether it is a commercial, home-grown, or open source system is not as important as whether it meets most of the collective needs, philosophy, and wants of the faculty delivering degree programs. Deciding which LMS to use is usually a campus-wide decision process, as it is akin to architecting and designing a classroom building system to serve all campus and online courses for a minimum of three to five years. For a quick look at the number and size of LMSes that are available, go to www. edutools.info where more than 100 LMSes are described according to over 40 different features and functions. The recently announced open source Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) software being developed by the Sakai Project (http://www.sakaiproject.org/) will very likely be an additional key resource in the future.
In addition to the community-wide campus infrastructure, faculty and students now have their own personal knowledge infrastructure. This personal infrastructure consists of laptops, basic and advanced productivity software, communication (often wireless) access, and all-digital textbooks, if desired. A prime example of the personal knowledge infrastructure is the laptop university model. With the advent of wireless access, more and more campuses are looking like laptop universities. What a difference just a few years can make!
Rule of Thumb #2: The More Hours of Instruction to be Designed and Developed, the Higher the Cost of Design and Development
Rule of Thumb #2 may seem obvious, but determining the number of hours of instruction to be designed for in a given program is not always obvious. For example, how many hours of online learning make a three-credit course? Here is a formula, based on the traditional model of a campus course: Using a formula of two hours of study outside class for every hour in class means that the usual three-credit campus course is 135 hours (45 hours of class time and 90 hours of directed study outside the class time). This formula means faculty transitioning a campus course to an online format only have to design and develop the 45 hours traditionally spent in the classroom. However, once this transition is done, many of the additional 90 hours of directed study are also redesigned over time. By the way, the number of hours-135-can be increased or decreased, based on the design of a particular program as well as the expectations of a campus culture."
By Judith V. Boettcher
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