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LOs are delivered by instructors who are often
unfamiliar with ICTs ;
LOs represent an area of the market which is still
very profitable for traditional classroom based
education.
Regarding the last item, resistance on the part of
instructors, who have always been the authors of the
destiny of e-learning initiatives, is presumable – and,
as far as we are concerned, already verifiable. By
instructors we mean everybody involved in the
development of courses and related educational
objects. The argument is very simple: considering
for example the business of professional training,
teaching a given subject requiring 20 classroom
hours to 100 people allows an instructor to suppose
N repetitions of the course, each multiplied by 20
hours, multiplied by their hourly pay. The economic
final reward (FR) for the instructor, by which to
calculate the threshold of convenience in creating
the LOs, is function (at least) of the following
parameters:
FR = f( r , h , hr , d , ph , hpc)
where
r = No. of course repetitions;
h = No. of hours of each edition;
hr = hourly rate of the teacher for that course
d = rate for design activities
ph = preparation hours needed for LOs creation
hpc = hourly preparation costs
Other elements should be considered, like the
location of the course, travel expenses, credibility of
the organization etc. Sometimes, moreover, a flat
rate is paid for design, or it is not always
recompensed, since instructors receive a good hourly
rate for classroom hours (particularly as they
become more senior).
In the simplest situations, the function can be
easily calculated as follows:
FR= r * h * hr + d – ph * hpc
There’s no doubt that unless a pay scheme for e-
learning courses at least as attractive to instructors as
that for traditional courses is provided, there will be
a further brake on the spread of e-learning. A
number of studies have focused on the determining
of parameters, and many authors have already
pointed out the complexity resulting from
methodologically and educationally based choices in
the construction of e-learning courses. (Bacsich eand
Asch, 1999); (Bacsich and Asch, 2001); (Lewin,
1995).
To a great degree, over-simplifying the idea
risks, we believe, the reoccurrence of the initial
problem, the “inexpedience” for experts of
transferring their knowledge through DL. We have
already drawn attention (Casagranda et al., 2010) to
criteria for calculating the production costs of LOs,
but extensive subsequent trials have revealed the
need to refine and integrate the model, especially in
the LOs design stage. In this paper we will propose
these extensions and refinements to our e-learning
costs model. We have added more importance to the
design stage, in order to allow the a-priori estimation
of the work done by the different experts involved in
project development.
2 THE DESIGN OF
EDUCATIONAL PROJECTS
The detailed preparation of an e-learning course or
environment needs to be done in advance. The
instructional designer should identify the subject
matter, define it operatively, decide how to evaluate
students’ knowledge and skills and introduce
occasions for feedback in order to support learning.
Therefore, we begin by identifying the different
phases of planning stages and then suggest how times
and costs might be calculated.
All e-learning projects include at least four basic
stages which lead to the delivery of a course. We
believe that in the evaluation of the effort involved,
we should quantify, optimize and recognize:
the design of the educational project;
the design of LOs through an analysis of subject
matter, which we introduce as modeling in this
article;
the development of educational material, the
utilization of which has already been described
by other researchers (Bartley e Golek, 2004);
the management of interactions with students in
order to further learning, mostly following web
2.0 approaches and tools (forums, blogs, wikis,
social network interactions etc.), as already
mentioned in previous articles (Casagranda et al.,
2010)
When discussing the design phase, we include a
number of dimensions, already mentioned elsewhere
(Raineri, 2005):
demand assessment: information about clients’
expectations is collected, clarified and selected,
through hypotheses which designers develop
considering technological issues about the
creation of LOs ;
the proposal of hypotheses: the variables and
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