Resources for ID Cost Estimates

Estimating Costs

Every project needs a plan, and plans require timelines and cost estimates. The most accurate type of estimate is deterministic. But calculating the costs individually is not practical in most instances. A better approach would be to use existing data where possible, such as past performance estimating or analogy estimating, where you rely on historic data from similar projects. (Thamhain & Riedy, 2014)

One site I found where you can get cost data for instructional design projects was

http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/costs.html#elearning .

The site, referred to as Big Dog and Little Dog’s Performance Juxtaposition has an excellent article on production time estimates for instructional design. There are a lot of links to outside material, as well as numerous resources and Instructional Design knowledge courtesy of Dr. Clark, but what I found most useful today was the example Excel cost estimator. Just a little tweaking for my project, plug in a few numbers on the first page and it can generate a pretty good starting estimate. (Clark, 2015)

My second resource for review today is https://raccoongang.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-create-online-course/ .

What I like about this site is the data is from January 2018 so hopefully I might spot some trends. Being someone that uses ADDIE, I like how the estimates are in the ADDIE format. The site also breaks work times down by task and by job title. There is also an interesting chart on the changes of resource rates in course creation over the 2017 to 2018 reports. (RaccoonGang, 2018)

 

References

Clark, D. R. (2015). Estimating Costs and Time in Instructional Design. Retrieved from http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/costs.html#elearning.

RaccoonGang. (2018). How much does it cost to create an online course? Retrieved from http://raccoongang.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-create-online-course/

Thamhain, H.J., & Riedy, D. (2014). Managing technology-based projects: Tools, techniques, people and business processes. (pp. 248–263). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.