implementing e-learningCore Good Practice Models |
Costing
e-Learning developments and their associated risks cost money and we need to be able to plan for this and set realistic budgets. The costing section of the Risk Management infoKit briefly covers various models.
Whatever your situation there is no such thing as a 'no cost' option if you are to develop e-learning provision! Some examples of where costs may occur are given below.
| If you are: | Then costs may be incurred by: |
Integrating existing tools and systems |
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Seeking to better use existing tools and systems |
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Selecting and Implementing new tools or systems |
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The Insight Project at the University of Strathclyde, launched with funding from the JISC, investigates evaluation of the costs and benefits of IT Usage in a Higher Education Environment. The project is concerned with evaluating the use of Information Technology (IT) within the Higher Education Sector. The objective is to produce a model which can provide relevant and consistent information on the benefits and costs of IT, thereby providing a framework for decision making and benchmarking within the University of Strathclyde and potentially within other institutions.
In particular if looking to use new open source software components either as e-learning tools or as integration middleware, it is a common myth that 'open source equals no cost'. Apart from the obvious costs of technical support/development staff, open source software incurs many of the same categories of cost as that of developing in-house or implementing commercial products, this may still include licensing and maintenance elements although these will usually be lower than their commercial counterparts. As the sector progresses towards 'community source' software - inter-institutional collaborative development of software tools and systems - there is a real hope that this may lessen the total cost of ownership, as products are more tailored to educational needs and/or more flexibly manipulated, rather than incurring the high costs of customised, clumsy 'bolt-ons' to commercial products that are ill-fitting to FE and HE needs. The University of Strathclyde have provided a guide to investing in such software and services.
Additional resources on costing models will be developed for inclusion within this Kit. Much is made of costing e-learning provision and developments, but have other forms of learning been accurately costed previously? This will be of particular interest as organisations move towards models of blended learning.
