Are you getting value for money on your learning resources?

Though it's not that frequently thought about outside of the business world, are you thinking about how much value your getting from your content? I'll share an interesting story with you:

I met up with an e-learning developer friend the other day who wanted me to evaluate a learning object they she put together. It was really quite good, I complimented her on going to the effort of keeping an eye on the cognitive load of the content and interactions of the learning object.

I was then advised that the my friend had spent a good 10 weeks developing it. I was taken aback, perturbed, my immediate question was how long had it been available to learners and how many people had used it. She told me it had been available for a month and few had used it (think less than double digits). It was too early to evaluate any improvement on performance or behaviour of the learners who had used it.

On further investigation it became apparent that there wasn't any plan to promote the learning object nor was there a plan to integrate it into the curriculum it served. Now, the academics reading this may be wondering what the problem is. Let me add a little perspective. I'm not an accountant but I'll do a calculation.

10 weeks (dev time) x £576 (weekly salary) = £5770

2 weeks (expert time) x £865 (weekly salary) = £1930

Total cost = £7700

That's an expensive, though very well designed object. So well designed in fact that it could and should replace the 3 hour session that is used to currently deliver the material. The learning object could even be provided as pre-learning as it covers the fundamentals for the course and several other courses. Lets do another calculation based on the assumption that this fundamental is recapped for an hour on 2 subsequent courses.

Time : 1hr (prep) + 3hr (del) + ((0.5hr (prep) + 1hr (del)) x 2) = 7hr

Total time: 7hr x 3 (runs a year) = 21hr

Total cost: 21hr x £16.5 (trainer hr) = £346.5

That total isn't significant and if that was the only benefit then it would take around 20 years to pay for itself. Clearly I've left out a lot of data when working this out as well as a lot of other beneficial factors. I didn't perform an ROI or CBA. But the example is to illustrate the question I posed in the title.

Are you thinking about value for money and how will you go about justifying the expense of an initiative?

What you don't consider and put effort into justifying now will come back to haunt you when budgets come up.

:end

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