It Only Took HOW Long?
A current project of ours has us collecting PowerPoint slides and voice narrations from doctors in a particular specialty. They’re submitting their presentations to a small panel who will choose the best ones, which will be presented live before an audience of doctors in the same specialty.
With 12 submissions total, we’ve ended up with 78 minutes of what could be argued is elearning content for doctors. Total production time? 11.9 hours. Run the math and it comes to 9.15 hours’ development time per hour of finished “seat time,” roughly 9:1. Compare this to high production value, interactive elearning, which generally takes 200-300 hours per hour (200:1 to 300:1).
So you could argue this rapid elearning takes less than 5% as much effort as “regular” elearning. Wow, right? The trouble is that the doctors each spent (in my estimate) 5-10 hours apiece preparing their slides and narrations. (I bet a couple spent 20+ hours.) That pops the ratio up to 55:1, and we’re ignoring the cost of the doctors’ time vs. our developers’ time.
Still, as a model for creating simple training (or educational marketing, more likely) better than just reading text on a screen, this isn’t bad stuff. Anyone who’s got the knowledge to share can leverage it into a basic training course for relatively little cost. Based on the examples above, a six-minute chunk should take 5-10 hours to put together, start to finish, assuming low interactivity. Building a whole catalog of material becomes affordable when appropriate techniques are used.
Tags: data, development time, elearning
February 2nd, 2009 at 8:12 am
So do you guys market voice over powerpoint presentation as a form of Rapid E-Learning.
Our rates depend on the level of interactivity.
February 2nd, 2009 at 8:51 am
That’s correct. We’ve done low-interactivity work using our Flash platform, but in the simplest cases it’s nearly as good (and a lot faster) just to take a PowerPoint presentation and add voiceover to it. The example above was using Adobe Presenter.
February 2nd, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Good post. I’d add that a lot of times the SME time is a wash. For example, if the doctors didn’t do the work and handed it off they’d still have to organize some of the content to hand off. Then there’d be a series of meetings to validate that the course developer was pulling the content together….and so forth. You might actually have more development time because of the extra meetings.
Either way, a lot of people forgot all of that and then would focus on the 9:1 rather than the actual costs. I think Bryan Chapman uses a 44:1 ratio, which is pretty close to the 55:1.
Send me an email when you get some time. I have a question.
February 2nd, 2009 at 5:23 pm
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