Online courses, instructional quality, and economics: a conceptual  (Page 4/8)

The first estimate is provided by Piskurich (2006) who generated data for use in calculating in-house ROI estimates. Nothing is sacred, of course, about these numbers, and he provided ranges rather than fixed values. Exactly how much something costs depends on the objectives of the task and the degree of quality desired in accomplishing the task. Good reason exists to rely upon Piskurich’s numbers. As noted, he gets fired if his instruction is ineffective. Thus, he is likely to spend enough to accomplish tasks in a quality manner. On the other hand, if he makes a project look too expensive, his boss will reject it. The contingencies create pressures to not exaggerate cost in either direction.

Suppose classes at a given institution meet for 42 hours per semester. The standard estimate is that face-to-face instruction would require 2-3 hours of preparation time per hour to prepare a course properly. Thus, 84-126 hours of preparation time should be needed to set up an on-campus class. For asynchronous e-learning, however, Piskurich estimated 45-100 hours of preparation time per class hour. Thus, 1890-4200 hours of preparation time would be needed to set up a course properly as an online course. Now, the interesting calculation is that Piskurich estimated the cost being involved at a minimum of $10,000 per hour of classroom instruction. Thus, the minimum cost to place a full semester course online properly would be 42 X $10,000 = $420,000. Of course, if something fancy is needed the cost would increase.

A second estimate is provided by Dierkmann (2001). He did not work in-house for a company but rather led a consulting firm. Therefore, Dierkmann’s cost included his profit margin as well. To place a 42 contact hour course online in 2001, he would have charged for 200 hours of preparation time for each contact hour. With his charge of $100 per preparation hour, the cost for developing an online course would be 42 x 200 x $100 = $840,000 for a full-semester course. Given inflation since 2001, this cost will have increased, but for the sake of the current illustration, we will simply allow this increase to compensate for Dierkmann’s profit margin. Although he made his living developing online instruction, Dierkmann told businesses that cost of doing online asynchronous learning is prohibitively high in most instances. He recommended that businesses not go online unless travel costs are very high (e.g., large multinational corporations) or consortiums are formed to share the cost.

Understanding why course development costs are so high requires knowing exactly what needs to be developed. Muchinsky (2006) listed four methods of instruction used in the business world: (1) programmed instruction; (2) intelligent tutoring systems; (3) interactive multimedia training; and (4) virtual reality training. Using a course shell such as Blackboard as an information dump was not even mentioned. Unlike either an in-class lecture or an online information dump, which can be prepared entirely by a subject matter expert (SME), e-learning requires the combined efforts of an SME to provide content knowledge, an instructional design (ID) expert to convert the content to appropriate activities (e.g., programmed instruction), and a computer specialist to convert the instructional design to computer code (Piskurich, 2006). For quality instruction, the contributions of either the ID expert or the computer specialist for e-learning cannot be overlooked or underemphasized. The $10,000 per hour of instruction is really for low end instructional design and computer code (e.g., programmed instruction). Virtual reality training can reach $100,000 per classroom hour equivalent.