Development Time For Online Delivery Courses?
Q: Does anyone know a good site that will give me information on benchmarking development time for online delivery courses? I would appreciate any information you have.
A: I believe that you absolutely can assign a value to the cost of design and development, but to get an accurate number you need to really understand your process and each of the elements that goes into developing a course. First, you cannot estimate anything without a course outline and you can't have a course outline without a needs assessment. I am not sure of how far you want to go with this, but I will assume that you are starting with a course outline and can now estimate the number of pages that will comprise your course. I will also assume that the actual storyboards are outside of this estimate. BTW - the better the storyboard the quicker the development, the less rework. Next, you need to look at the elements of each page: Graphics, audio, text, videos, question objects...etc And some up with some rough estimates of the time each takes. We use three times for each element, so for example: Simple Graphics = x minutes Standard graphics = y minutes Complex graphics = z minutes Do that for each element that you might have on a page. Now, what is your best guess as to the mix of simple, standard and complex elements in your course? For example, is it 40% simple, 50% standard, and 10% complex? With this guestimate you can now get a rough idea of the time it will take you to create your pages. Then, you need to add time for the background (s) and navigation and other special programming. You did not mention any time for QC and/or alpha testing. The quality of your development process will determine how much time you need to devote here. I can tell you