Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Features
Online Course Development: What Does It Cost?
6/29/2004
D'es 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 B'ettcher 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.
Recommended Reading
- Beck Technology Donates DProfiler to Colleges, Universities
Beck Technology recently announced that it will donate its DProfiler software platform to colleges and universities for use in construction-related coursework.
- Microsoft Adds Gen 4 Datacenters for Cloud Computing
Microsoft is initiating the fourth in a series of datacenter upgrades to enable its cloud computing services, according to a Microsoft blog post Tuesday. And, like everything else in the software world, being highly modular is a good thing.
- Can You Operate as a Virtual Being?
Now that we are conducting at least a part of our business of education virtually and often meeting in virtual environments, let's explore the really big question for academics in a Web 2.0 era...
- Columbia Center To Smooth Web Operations with Collaboration Suite
A college or university without a Web site is inconceivable today, but with every site comes the challenge of managing content. Some sort of automated system is a given, but how much should the site's content management system integrate with other aspects of the campus computing infrastructure?
- IBM's Pass It Along: Mapping Memes Toward A Learning Organization
How IBM's new release is following through on old challenges... big ones.
- North Idaho College To Provide Accessible Lecture Recordings for Disabled Students
North Idaho College will be implementing a new classroom capture system as part of an effort to provide accessible education to students with disabilities. The college will be using SpeakerBox from ClearSky Systems for the lecture capture program beginning in January 2009.
