Ben Betts is…

It doesn’t seem to matter how many years tick by in this industry, by far and away the most common phone call I get is from companies looking to run E-learning pilots, or prototypes, or anything else in the “just getting started” framework.

It’s not a criticism of the clients, far from it; I’m delighted to be the person who helps to mould the minds of newcomers to the E-learning genre, call me anytime! But doesn’t it strike you as odd, in an industry that’s now 15 years old, that everyone else is still getting started?

I’m not alone in my sentiments, just this morning I retweeted a link from Clive Shepherd – “What every learning and development professional needs to know about e-learning”. Indeed, there are two burning questions that all clients (both new and old) want to know when I speak to them; how much is it going to cost and why shouldn’t I do it myself?

My contemporary, Karl Kapp, actually beat me to the punch on this one with his post “How much for that E-learning in the Window”, but I’ll let him off as he referenced me so nicely. He referenced a few other places but most telling was his link to Intellum, a state-side competitor to HT2. They have a great bit on their website which gives you a ballpark figure on what your E-learning will cost which I strongly suggest you check out as I feel its quite representative of the market place.

A recent study by Defelice & the aforementioned Mr Kapp, (brought to my attention care of Michael Hanley and Brandon Hall), showed a new set of figures for how long it currently takes to develop 1 hour of E-learning content. Keep this table of figures in your mind, as I’m going to use it over the rest of this post.

The metric of “1 hour of E-learning content” is important to us in the E-learning industry so you might want it in your arsenal of questions to ask an E-learning developer when you phone them. Most companies will give you a ball park figure on how much 1 hour of E-learning content development is. This figure will range widely but typically I’d be expecting to hear anything from £5,000 per hour up to £40,000 per hour plus.

This is quite a range. And unfortunately we hit the same sort of stumbling blocks as we did with LMS pricing – not all E-learning is born equal! However, if we dig into the figures a little, we start to get an idea of where these numbers come from.

An experienced and professional E-Learning development company, like HT2, who specialise in bespoke content development will probably use software like Articulate or straight Adobe Flash to create their content. So if we take the mean average time it takes to develop 1 hour of E-learning, with limited interactivity and no animations using this sort of software and we multiply that by a typical “daily rate” figure, we can estimate how much an 1 hour of this sort of content should cost.

So:

(94.5 [hrs mean development time] / 7.5 [working hours in a day]) x 400 [typical daily rate] = £5,400 for 1 hours basic E-learning content.

This about tally’s up with the bottom end of my earlier estimate.

Now let’s look at the option of not hiring a bespoke content development company and doing it yourself. You probably won’t be using the move advanced tools like Flash and Articulate, so we’ll look at the figures for easier tools, such as Captivate. I’m also going to estimate that the internal cost of a days development is half that of the external company, £200. I’m also not adding in the cost of training individuals, which will probably run to a few thousand.

(241.5 [hrs mean development time] / 7.5 [working hours in a day]) x 200 [typical daily rate] = £6,440 for 1 hours basic E-learning content.

What we’re saying here is that, even at the bottom end of the scale in terms of complexity, it’s worth your money to hire in the experts. Not only could it be cheaper; it will also take less time – half in this case.

It’s not so useful to measure up the scale of interactivity/animation in this manner as it becomes less likely your internal functions could produce the graphics, sounds and animations that accompany more complex E-learning. Here you really will need to call in the experts to get the job done.

I realise I still haven’t told you come how you will get quotes in the £20k plus range. Well let’s look at the other end of the scale, a fully interactive Simulation:

(525.5 [hrs mean development time] / 7.5 [working hours in a day]) x 400 [typical daily rate] = £28,024 for a 1 hour Simulation on “Softskills”.

Again this is a big estimate – as your learning becomes more complex, it requires more specialist development skills. And the more people are involved, the more difficult it is to project manage. The rise in cost of truly high-spec E-learning development is almost exponential.

There is a pitfall in my cost saving argument for using the experts to develop your E-learning and that is this:

Experts almost certainly won’t recommend an hours worth of E-learning with limited interactivity and no animations.

In our experience this sort of material will not hold the learners attention in a corporate environment. It might work in a Higher Education setting, where your whole motivation is based around learning, but where your learners have a day job that isn’t learning, you need to engage them on a whole new level.

In the end using experts might not be cheaper than doing it internally, but it is certainly comparable and you will get a lot more for your money. Not to mention the fact that your learners will potentially take a lot more away from the experience, which is kind of the point in the first place!