Associate Director of the UT TeleCampus Rob Robinson’s delivery cost comparison of online and face-to-face courses has resulted in plans for a second initiative, to compare developmental costs, that is slated to begin this summer and take approximately six months to complete.

According to Darcy Hardy, assistant vice chancellor and director of the UT TeleCampus, "we have started to play around with the methodology, because looking at development costs of online learning is fairly easy; it can range, but you can put a cost factor on it based on how extensive the media is inside a course and what kind of technology you are using, etc."

However, looking at development costs for face-to-face courses is a bit more challenging. "You have to go back and look at the costs associated with the course when it was first conceived in a department," says Hardy. "It depends on the department; it depends on the college. A faculty member might have a course release, or they might not; they may have had a curriculum committee review the original syllabus. There are old slides, old notes and PowerPoints."

So, Hardy and Robinson are going to team up to take a close look at traditional education development costs at all the institutions in the UT System and then compare those costs to the development costs of online education at UT TeleCampus. "We are going to dig deep and try to provide a broad brush stroke of various size campuses and varies disciplines and see if we can come up with an average development cost to compare," says Hardy. "We will be coming up with a consistent methodology to allocate some value to the activities going on," adds Robinson.

"We are trying to do substantive things that are beyond just producing, delivering and operating an online organization," Hardy says. "We are trying to do things that we think will help the field in general."