eLearning Development Time and Cost: A Guide
When it comes to eLearning development, some of the things people want to know is how much will the eLearning development time and cost be.
This is true for both internal company projects and consulting projects. What significant stakeholders often lose sight of is that quality eLearning course development takes a significant amount of time. The more unknown variables there are at the onset, the harder it is to achieve an accurate estimate.
The delicate part is filtering basic content from the advanced. You also have to consider other elements. These might be job aids, technical documents, and other relevant assets as part of the building blocks of eLearning. That being said, it’s important to invest time in the development of these resources. You may have a steady grip on the content you’ll be including in your eLearning deliverable. However, estimating the development time of your eLearning course needed to complete all of these tasks can be somewhat challenging. Ensuring your client that every hour has been devoted to the design and development process is of great importance.
How to Time and Cost Estimates
It all starts with researching your target audience and beginning to create the eLearning course objectives. Gathering your team, and assigning responsibilities and tools, so that each performs to the best of their ability, ensues. This estimation mandates discussion with the team at hand to be certain of meeting deadlines for the task at hand. Storyboarding serves as a guide for both the project manager and the rest of the team and as such demands a fair amount of time for a detailed overview.
The design must reflect the brand image and the theme of the subject matter, with every individual element tied together. Determining the content creation and instructional design development time includes multimedia production such as videos, podcasts, effective scenarios, etc. that require a lot of time. For instance, authoring a complex programming language requires a great deal of coding, something that is an important part of your eLearning course development time and cost estimate. Last in a series of steps is testing and revisions that may include focus groups, individual testing sessions followed by interviews or surveys to get invaluable feedback, and even client demonstrations.
Summing Up
The current market landscape mandates the meeting or more importantly exceeding standards of instructional development as part of the amount invested, in terms of the time and cost of the development of an eLearning program. When collating cost estimates and preparing project plans, project managers and instructional designers face difficulty. This is, how to estimate the extent of the course, and the time and cost it takes to develop an exercise.
Remember to always expect the unexpected when you estimate your eLearning course development time and cost. It is imperative to allow room for slipups, emergencies, or additions, to ensure that your bid is always spot-on.
Contact us if you are interested in a eLearning training program that is tailored to the needs of your organization or team.
