Amit Garg | August 19th, 2009 | Rapid eLearning, Upside Learning, eLearning Development
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How long does it take to create one hour of eLearning?
According to an article posted on the ASTD website by Karl Kapp and Robyn A. Defelice, the time needed to develop one hour of self paced eLearning could take between 90 hours and 1743 hours. It depends on what level of interactivity you are aiming for and what tools (with or without templates)you are using.
Here’s the table from that article:
| My Take on These Numbers: | |
| 1. | It’s surprising that ‘development without a template’ does not take substantially more effort then that required for ‘development within templates’. It used to take higher efforts in 2003 but now takes much lesser. I can’t believe this! |
| 2. | I would imagine soft skills simulations to take equal efforts if not more than those required for application simulations. May be there is a difference in understanding of these kinds of simulations s in general. |
| 3. | The numbers for ‘development within a template (using Lectora etc.)’ seem to have gotten mixed up. I’d expect high interactivity courseware to take the most development effort. |
Do you feel comfortable with these numbers? I don’t.
If you wish to contribute to this continuing survey you can do it here. I will certainly be doing so.
August 25th, 2009 at 6:14 am
[...] eLearning Development: How long does it Really take?- Upside Learning Blog, August 19, 2009 [...]
January 6th, 2010 at 8:36 pm
Good stuff! I am new to your blog, but consider me a new follower
Development hours also depends on the skill of the designer and which development tools you use . I’m not sure if this is a good time estimate to use for scheduling either. As you would need to consider other factors (perhaps the ASTD article did consider these factors, I’ll be sure to review).
Development within a template may take longer because of the editing of unwanted elements and the need to add required elements that are not within the original template. Sometimes it is just easier/better to develop a template from scratch, using existing templates as inspiration.