Scheduling, budgets, and tasks.  Instinctively I think we do these things on a daily basis and don’t even realize it.  It can be as simple as planning a child’s birthday party, or planning a vacation.  We necessarily don’t think of them as projects, but if you look at the tasks associated with them, they truly fall under the heading of project management.  Transferring those skills to an ID project can seem like a daunting task.

While searching the internet for information, I came across a couple of great sites.  The first is http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/costs.html .  What I liked about this site is that it broke down some budgeting information down to the hour of development, and went even further to indicate if the training was synchronous or asynchronous.  It also provided some interesting links for stock photos and audacity.  Here is a chart that Clark listed.

Estimating Development Hours

Bryan Chapman of Brandon-Hall listed these average design times to create one-hour of training:

• 34:1 -- Instructor-Led Training (ILT), including design, lesson plans, handouts, PowerPoint slides, etc. (Chapman, 2007).
• 33:1 -- PowerPoint to E-Learning Conversion (Chapman, 2006a, p20).
• 220:1 -- Standard e-learning, which includes presentation, audio, some video, test questions, and 20% interactivity (Chapman, 2006a, p20)
• 345:1 -- 3rd party courseware. Time it takes for online learning publishers to design, create, test and package 3rd party courseware (Private study by Bryan Chapman
• 750:1 -- Simulations from scratch. Creating highly interactive content (Chapman, 2006b)

Development times to create one-hour of e-learning (The eLearning Guild, 2002):

• Simple Asynchronous: (static HTML pages with text & graphics): 117 hours
• Simple Synchronous: (static HTML pages with text & graphics): 86 hours
• Average Asynchronous: (above plus Flash, JavaScript, animated GIF's. etc): 191 hours
• Average Synchronous: (above plus Flash, JavaScript, animated GIF's. etc): 147 hours
• Complex Asynchronous: (above plus audio, video, interactive simulations): 276 hours
• Complex Synchronous: (above plus audio, video, interactive simulations): 222 hours

While these are averages, it does help to identify some sort of timeline.  An average instructor led class takes 34 hours to develop for one hour of training, where a standard e-learning course for one hour takes much, much longer.  This is something that an ID would need to take into consideration when estimating timelines in their project.    This site had a wealth of information on the total ID process, not just the project management portion.  A great find for any ID.  

Another source that I found, was a book on ID Project management.  Granted, my search only allowed some snipets of the book, what I did see was encouraging.  https://books.google.com/books?id=QUiGzp0PPyMC&pg=PA47&lpg=PA47&dq=how+to+estimate+a+cost+for+an+id+project&source=bl&ots=5GjYdZHtPj&sig=tUa1Gx1n7tmoAbeUAbge_2bK1sE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=nkzWVKPGKIqrgwTo4YGADA&ved=0CE8Q6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=how%20to%20estimate%20a%20cost%20for%20an%20id%20project&f=false .  What I liked about this was that there were several templates listed to assist with estimating costs.  It brought to light several elements of a project that a new Instructional designer might overlook.  Something as simple as the cost to set up a room might be an overlooked item for example. 

Below is a template that I located that I really like.  Each one of these could then be broken down into a WBS of its own.

(Greer, 1999)

While that book is no longer available for sale new, you can find it on Amazon or a printable pdf version at http://michaelgreer.biz/?p=4253 .

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