Rick Shearer shared the following hours-budgeted-by task figures for the development and delivery of a standard online distance education course at Penn State World Campus. The hours shown for second time offerings and subsequent offerings indicate time required to implement edits and changes after the course runs the first time and then ongoing maintenance of the course to get it ready for each semester. These hours do not include faculty time or time associated with the original vetting of a project. They only depict actual instructional design and development time spent for a single online distance education course.

Key: ID - Instructional Designer, IDS - Instuctional Design Specialist (editors and designers that are focused on printed products), IT - Instructional Technologists (programmers for special CGI code, Flash, etc.), TT - Technical Typist, GA - Graphic artists and multimedia, Wage - Wage support for IDs and GAs, PS - Production Specialists (handle all copyright permissions, liaison with bookstore and other vendors that work in the production phase