Lesson 7 - Choosing Media

12.2. Cost Categories

The main cost categories to be considered in using educational media and technologies, and especially blended or online learning, is as follows:

These are the costs needed to pull together or create learning materials using particular media or technologies. There are several sub-categories of development costs:

• Production costs: making a video or building a course section in a learning management system, or creating a virtual world. Included in these costs will be the time of specialist staff, such as web designers or media or computer specialists, as well as any costs in web design or video production.
• Your time as an instructor: the work you have to do as part of developing or producing materials. This will include planning/course design as well as development. Your time is money, and probably the largest single cost in using educational technologies, but more importantly, if you are developing learning materials you are not doing other things, such as research or interacting with students, so there is a real cost, even if it is not expressed in dollar terms.
• Copyright clearance if you are using third party materials such as photos or video clips. Again, this is more likely to be thought of as time in finding and clearing copyright more than money.
• Probably the cost of an instructional designer in terms of their time.

Development costs are usually fixed or ‘once only’ and are independent of the number of students. Once media are developed, they are usually scalable, in that once produced, they can be used by any number of learners without increased development costs. Using open educational resources can greatly reduce media development costs.

Delivery

This includes the cost of the educational activities needed during offering the course and would include instructional time spent interacting with students, instructional time spent on marking assignments, and would include the time of other staff supporting delivery, such as teaching assistants, adjuncts for additional sections and instructional designers and technical support staff.

Because of the cost of human factors such as instructional time and technical support needed in media-based teaching, delivery costs tend to increase as student numbers increase, and also have to be repeated each time the course is on offer. In other words, they are recurrent. However, increasingly with Internet-based delivery, there is usually a zero direct technology cost in delivery.

Once materials for a course are created, they need to be maintained. URLs go dead, set readings may go out of print or expire, and more importantly, new developments in the subject area may need to be accommodated. Thus once a course is offered, there are ongoing maintenance costs.

Instructional designers and/or media professionals can manage some of the maintenance, but nevertheless teachers or instructors will need to be involved with decisions about content replacement or updating. Maintenance is not usually a major time consumer for a single course, but if an instructor is involved in the design and production of several online courses, maintenance time can build to a significant amount.

Maintenance costs are usually independent of the number of students, but are dependent on the number of courses an instructor is responsible for, and are recurrent each year.

These include infrastructure or overhead costs, such as the cost of licensing a learning management system, lecture capture technology and servers for video streaming. These are real costs but not ones that can be allocated to a single course but will be shared across a number of courses. Overheads are usually considered to be institutional costs and, although important, probably will not influence a teacher’s decision about which media to use, provided these services are already in place and the institution does not directly charge for such services.

However, if a new online program is to be offered on a full cost-recovery basis, then other institutional overheads will also need to be added. Some will be the same as for on-campus courses (for example, a contribution towards the President’s Office), but other overheads applied to on-campus students, such as building maintenance, will not apply to a fully online program (which is the main reason that the net cost of an online program is usually less than that of a campus-based program).