Instructional Design and Technology

This blog was created as a class project for my Instructional Design and Technology degree from Walden University. Blogging is an educational tool that can be used to share information with my fellow classmates and vice versa. I hope you find this site both informative and useful.

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Estimating Costs and Allocating Resources

There are many resources available online for estimating costs and time of various projects. Two articles I found extremely helpful for working on the budget portion of my course project are: 

"How Long Does It Take?" by Karl Kapp describes four methods for estimating costs of developing elearning.  Included are analogous estimating, parametric modeling, bottom-up estimating, and using industry standards.  In this article, the author describes the advantages and disadvantages of each method of cost estimation and provides excellent examples of each.  I particularly found the table of standardizations for developing elearning very helpful for my course project.  

On the Big Dog & Little Dog's web site, Don Clark's article on Estimating Costs and Time in Instructional Design gives several valuable guidelines for estimating training costs and development time.  In addition, he addresses instructor time and seat time (the time spent by the learner in the learning environment).  Baseline estimates from which you can begin the process of determining the total number of hours it will take to design, develop, and evaluate one hour of ICW are provided in tables.  To help with estimating training costs, an excel spreadsheet cost estimator template is available for downloading.  Having estimates that have already been calculated and proven can be a big time saver when working on budgets.

3 comments:

  1. I liked the Karl Kapp resource a lot. I thought the lists of industry standard estimations of time were very helpful and would prove to be a great resource. Both Rusell and and the Portny text state the importance of the reliance on past budgeting experience which is usually what standards are based on (Russell, 2000)(Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton, and Kramer, 2008). I agree that it is important to analyize carefully whether the standard will bare true for your particular project or if adjustment is needed, yet the standard can serve as a good basis to begin.

    References
    Russell, L. (2000). Project management for trainers. Alexandria, VA: ASTD Press.

    Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B. E. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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  2. I'm going to second the sentiments of the Karl Kapp resource. He relies on Russell for some of his information, which builds confidence since it is part of our reading this term. Karl breaks down budgeting and the types of ways to perform it quite nicely. It's a great resource to have and refer back to.

    Thanks for sharing!

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