To create authentic, enduring, learner-centered distributed learning environments, we need to continue to figure out ways to preserve student access to learnign content indefinitely. This one of the most important reasons to champion the OER movement. But we also need to continue to put pressure on commercial providers to come up with subscription / licensing models that don’t artificially cut off access to content when a semester ends.

Thanks for pushing this conversation along!

Seb is correct, the costs were incurred over five years or more. There were two components that were exceptionally expensive: One is the BBC video productions that were both broadcast and, by student preference, made available as VHF video tapes. Producers for the Discovery channel here in the U.S. say they typically can be paid no more than US$60,000 per 30 minute segment to meet break-even. In the U.S. a course represents 45 classroom hours; at these rates the cost of video for a course would be $5.4 million. Representatives at Coastline College–one of the quality sources of multimedia instructional materials–estimate the video for one of their online courses is now from $500,000 to $1 million. This is less both because the availability now of low cost and high performance video equipment and their expertise at production. The second high cost activity at OU was employing teams of professors with discipline expertise and those with expertise in teaching and assessment for that discipline. These teams, with production staff from Open University and BBC, typically took one to two years to complete a course.

Creating effective course materials is expensive. So far few colleges and universities have been able or willing to allocate those resources.

It is unreasonable to ask faculty to create such materials because (1) they likely do not have extensive background in pedagogy and instructional design and multimedia authoring technologies, (2) they likely do not have the production experience to produce professional level learning materials, and (3) production takes a lot of time and effort.

For the next decade or so we can expect the costs of production to increase even those the cost of the technology may decrease. Student expectations, as with motion pictures, are constantly increasing. Game-like student/learning system interaction is both very effective and very expensive.

Forthcoming research will show how few resources are available to faculty. Preliminary estimates show a educational technologist supports more than 100 faculty, or less than 12 hours per academic year per professor.

Perhaps this both clarifies the estimates and provides some motivation for the estimates

It is, if course, important to acknowledge the effort many talented and dedicated faculty have made in producing materials for their students, often over several years.

Seb