Free Costing Worksheet (Unit 6)

As I was looking for an article for our Google Doc annotated bibliography, I found an article entitled "Using a Web-based System to Estimate the Cost of Online Course Production" in the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration.

Here's the link: http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/fall123/gordon123.html

Due to our discussions about how to appropriately plan for distance education course costs, I thought this might be of interest to people.

Most notably, the authors provide free access to an early version of their work, an Excel spreadsheet that can help determine effort and costs for developing an online course.

Here's the link for that: http://preweb.clt.odu.edu/cost

It is not for the Excel faint of heart, but it could be a great asset. Enjoy!

Moving Ahead with a Virtual Learning Project

We just had a meeting with/presentation from the company I have been in talks with on creating a "virtual oncology practice" for continuing medical education. After a couple preliminary discussions, this meeting had our COO, our IT people, and our Sr. VP for clinical content there. They were all excited and enthusiastic about working on a project like this!

So I got the go ahead from my boss (our COO) and we are going to start some next steps: a formal proposal with cost estimates from the company, a confidentiality agreement, and a master services agreement. These are administrative items that we must complete before we start even thinking about content or program planning.

This will all take some time and we won't get this going until mid-2011 I imagine--we have to get agreements done, plan the program and most importantly, raise the money to do it. But I am excited to be pursuing this and frankly think I wouldn't have been disposed to a positive response to this if it weren't for this course.

So thanks, ADTED 531! :)

Unit 6 Assignment (Unit 6)

Let's face it, the assignment for Unit 6 was tough!

I don't know about everyone else, but the main challenge for me was figuring out what our esteemed group of instructors actually wanted from us--a proposal? a list of bullet points? a set of references? what?

Another aspect of the challenge (for me anyway) was that frankly the class to this point has had a fairly light workload--my brain had been lulled into a state of ease! :)

After stumbling for several days and spending my energy in what I came to see was several wrong directions, and with input from faculty (thanks to everyone who asked questions that prompted the email!), it finally clicked that I was supposed to write a budget. D'oh!

I am OK with budgeting since I do it all the time for work. All the educational programs we do are funded by grants and of course every grant proposal must have a budget to let the funders know what we will do with the money they give.

How about you all? How was this assignment for you?

Why Make the Transition to DE? (Unit 5)

As I was reading chapter 11 in "Delivering Digitally", I was struck by the list on page 192 about what an institution wants to accomplish by moving to DE from F2F. The reasons listed were:

• reduce costs
• enhance reputation
• improve learning
• promote offerings
• generate income through selling software

(Inglis, Ling, and Joosten, 2002)

What seemed to be missing was related to the resource issues we're looking at Unit 6: an increase in market share. Perhaps the authors meant this when they said "promote offerings" but if so, it's not very clear. It seems to me that many institutions believe that DE will help them increase enrollment/revenue/market share.

Another way to look at this is to see that nowhere on the list from the text is the idea of increasing access (again, may have been implied in "promote offerings" but this is unclear).

I have shared with some folks who were in previous classes with me that one of the local universities where I teach as an adjunct had asked me before to adapt my course from a F2F class to an online course. One of the reasons (at least told to me) was that the university was opening a campus in a smaller city about 1.5 hours away and that having my course as a DE class would allow students at that campus to take it, without a long commute.

This makes sense but we can see that in this case even the issue of access relates to the idea of revenue generation. Opening another campus I am sure was seen as a way to tap into a market that the university must have deemed could support it--otherwise why spend all the money that goes into this?

So while we're thinking about all the resources that go into creating a DE course and program, I think it's important to realize that most organizations (whether for- or non-profit) need to see some sort of return in order to justify the resource investment.

Let's hope that improving learning and meeting students' needs are seen as valid returns. But underlying all of it is revenue (in most situations, any way). And I don't mean to demonize this--institutions must have revenue to operate, I understand.

I know in my other practice setting (of my day job managing CME), a huge reason we have done more and more DE programming is the availability of funding.

What about your organizations or companies? If you're doing DE, why?

More than just infrastructure (Unit 5)

Something that leaped out at me in Chapter 6 of "Delivering Digitally" was part of the ITAP case study. While the chapter is about infrastructure, I found it notable that the case study said, "The ITAP project leaders recognized that in order to achieve their aims they needed to address issues of cultural and structural change" (p.98).

This resonated with me because from what I have experienced, infrastructure change comes about and is successful only to the extent that "cultural and structural change" (of an institution, an organization, a company, a group, even a class) can happen.

The issues of infrastructure are ones that my own organization has been dealing with for about two years now (at least educational infrastructure, anyway). With funding getting tighter and tighter, it has been harder to raise money for some of the types of educational programs we have done for several years now and which have been very successful. Many of my colleagues and I had been urging (politely of course!) our CEO that we could do more of this type of work in house (that we had the expertise and just needed some of the hard tech that the chapter points outs as needs--servers, etc.). Although he never came out and said so, I don't think he believed us.

But here we are two years later, and after pushing for and achieving some cultural change (small-scale pilot projects demonstrating success which I believe increased confidence) and some structural change (a couple of my colleagues and I are in higher-level positions now), we are now working toward some infrastructure change!

Has anyone else seen this dynamic at work? Can you share any examples? Or are there other dynamics that could be at work in situations like this? What do you think?

Virtual World Learning Update

I met with the CEO of Tandem Learning yesterday and am exploring the possibility of creating a virtual learning world as a form of continuing medical education for my organization. The meeting was fascinating! I saw demos and examples--really great!

The next step is a bigger meeting/demo with all my organization's senior management and clinical experts, but I am confident they will like what they see.

I wanted to share with you all one example that was shared with me: a "virtual territory" training for pharmaceutical sales reps which involves scenario-based decision making.

Check this out:
http://www.tandem-learning.com/Tandem%20Learning%20Demos/Virtual%20Territory%20Demo.wmv

Please share any thoughts or reactions you have! I may not respond immediately as I am traveling for work through Saturday, but I look forward to your comments.


Dierdre

Emotions in Distance Learning (Unit 4)

This week in class we've been discussing characteristics of adult distance learners. In our class discussion forum I shared thoughts on the notion that adults are more internally motivated than externally. I shared how I have seen internal and external motivations intertwined, sometimes almost symbiotically so, in the adults in my online undergraduate composition courses.

I don't meant to repeat this, but I am finding that some additional reading I am doing is resonating with this whole set of thoughts. In "Facilitating Transformative Learning: Engaging Emotions in an Online Context" (2009), authors Dirkx and Smith look at transformative learning in distance education and examine the role of emotions in the process.

When I read the Dirkx and Smith piece (a book chapter--see reference below), I saw that when I talked about the intertwining of motivations, I had not explicitly linked motivation to emotion. Now it's clear to me that this can be the case--external motivators can be linked to the internal motivation of emotional states that a person may want to achieve or avoid.

What's especially interesting here is that I don't know that we usually think of distance education as a setting for emotion or an emotional life. Or at least I don't think I have thought of it that way--what about you?

And yet when I take the time to actually think about the learner and what kind of emotional response a learner may have to distance education, and I think about my own experience, I realize that I am constantly navigating the emotional lives of (some of) my students. They often share amazing, emotional, quite personal things with me and with the class. So for at least my students, there is absolutely an emotional aspect of the distance education experience they are living (since they are often coming back to school as older adults or after negative academic experiences in the past).


What do you think about emotions and the emotional life in distance education?





Reference (again sorry--cannot keep the APA formatting here):

Dirkx, J. & Smith, R. (2009). Facilitating transformative learning: Engaging emotions in an online context. In J. Mezirow & E. Taylor, Eds., Transformative learning in practice (pp. 57-66). San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons.

Virtual World Learning--Progress! (Unit 3)

We've all been talking/blogging/posting/Skyping about second life and virtual worlds and their role/value/function in distance education. And I have shared (with a few people I think), how I have been thinking about this sort of format for continung medical education (my day job). I thought I was ahead of the curve on this one, but.....apparently not! :)

Today when I got into the office I had an email from a colleague at the medical education office of a pharma company that provides grants to my organization. The goal was to introduce me to a person and a company that---yes, you guessed it--does virtual world training! It was as if this person had my office bugged (or was recording my keystrokes) because I had not shared these thoughts with anyone except you, my classmates, and my staff.

The company is Tandem Learning. Here's a link to their site:

http://www.tandem-learning.com/

Now I just learned about them today, so I cannot say anything about what they do. But I can tell you that I am working to schedule a meeting with their CEO so she can present to my organization and we can figure out if we can work together.

It's so great when the streams of this course and my work life meld together! :)

Budgets, Costs and DE (Unit 3)

A colleague in the class asked about the cost associated with my computer mediated instruction program example from the main discussion board. The program cost $75,000 which in my world of CME and a national program to educate thousands of people over a one year time span is not very expensive at all (in fact it's positively cheap!). I responded with a few more details on what was included in the budget, and this made me think even more about this issue.

I deal with budgets all the time in my "day job" where I am responsible for creating and costing out new and recurring programs, then obtaining the grant funding to run the programs. This means that I take for granted many concepts that I realize not everyone may have experience with. The issue of budget is especially important in DE since there is the assumption that DE is automatically cheaper than F2F education. Chapter 4 in the text Delivering Digitally (not required reading but I read it anyway since I deal with these issues all the time) talked about how to identify whether a DE course will provide savings or not. One of the main issues is fixed costs versus variable costs. If the fixed costs are high and the variable costs are low, then there is likely to be savings from DE (scalability). If the variable costs are high, then savings from DE are less likely.

This makes sense to me and illustrates my own organization's DE example I used in the class discussion board. Yes, the fixed costs are fairly high (highly educated staff and expert faculty equal high content development costs), but the variable costs are extremely low. It costs no more to have 1,000 people complete this activity than it does to have 100 people complete it (there's the scalability). So this DE actually gets cheaper the more people participate in it. And this is the point I made about the funders of this activity. They are looking at the high initial cost of $75K across the 1,000 and likely many more participants (likely more since we reached 560 completers in one month).

My colleague pointed out that $75K is a lot of money say for a program to train K-12 educators. So the challenge here is to think of fixed and variable costs again. How do they compare? Once we know that, THEN we will know if $75K is "a lot of money" or not. Of course for regular people, yes $75K is a lot of money--no argument from me on that! But we're talking about organizations and institutions and far-ranging DE programs. And in that context, we cannot automatically assume that $75K is a lot.

This issue of cost is the "hidden world" of DE (or any E!)--and an important issue in course design too. For institutions to invest in DE, then they surely want to design courses/programs that minimize the variable costs in order to recoup their investment and cover costs, and if a for-profit institution, then bring in some margin too.

Please share your thoughts and experience on these costs and budget issues.