It's a bit like answering how long an elastic band is, but here's a general answer:
Bryan Chapman from Chapman Alliance has conducted a survey where he asked a number of people who do e-learning. The question is “how many development hours does it take to develop one course hour, i.e. a student spends one hour going through the material”. Now, this will often depend on an estimate of how long a given activity takes for different users, but it is not entirely foolproof to use as a yardstick.
The study involved 249 companies and organizations, with a total of 3947 course developers who have created courses that have been viewed by a total of 19,875,946 people. That is a relatively large amount of data, from quite a few developers.
Time for the evolution of traditional classroom teaching
The survey also asked how long it takes to DEVELOP traditional classroom instruction (also called ILT – Instructor Led Training). The time includes analysis, design, lesson plans, handouts, workbooks, PowerPoint, and content expert review of content to be used.
Time for development (development hours : teaching hours)
- 22:1 – Simple learning content, possibly reuse of a learning source material, with minimal support material.
- 43:1 – Average project to create classroom teaching with good support materials (Lesson plan, handouts, workbooks, PowerPoint, etc.).
- 82:1 – Complex subject, highly custom designed, extended time spent developing supporting materials.
- NOTE that the above figures DO NOT include time for the actual completion of the courses.
E-learning categories
The study divides e-learning into 3 categories based on how complex it is: 1. Basic, 2. Interactive, 3. Advanced. Below are descriptions of each category and the time it takes to develop it.
1. Basic e-learning
Content pages, text, graphics, maybe simple audio, maybe simple video, test questions. NOTE: PowerPoint-for-elearning often falls into this category. Basically we are dealing with slides followed by a test or quiz.
Ranges between 49 hours of development time for 1 hour of instruction up to 125 hours of development time. The norm is around 79 hours of development time for 1 hour of instruction.
2. Interactive e-learning
Level 1 elearning plus 25% (or more) interactive exercises, allowing students to perform virtual “Try It” exercises, liberal use of multimedia (audio, video and animations)
Ranges between 127 hours of development time for 1 hour of instruction up to 267 hours of development time. The norm is around 184 hours of development time for 1 hour of instruction.
3. Advanced e-learning
Highly interactive, possibly simulation, serious games/game-based, use of Avatars, user-defined interactions, award-winning course material.
Ranging from 217 hours of development time for 1 hour of instruction up to 490 hours of development time. The “norm” is around 716 hours of development time for 1 hour of instruction. (Very few projects are at this level.) NOTE: Several respondents reported more than 2000+ hours of development per completed hour (very advanced simulations and games).
Notes on the study.
It is clear that it depends to some extent on estimates whether a course is on the verge of being at the high end of Level 1 or the low end of Level 2. But the above numbers fit very well with what our 15 years of experience in developing content tells us.
The stated time includes ALL time spent developing a course, including gathering knowledge about the content and working on how the content is best presented/structured (what in elearning Jargon is called “Instructional Design”).
Overall, just over half of the time is spent on actual production work in authoring tools (e.g. Articulate Storyline, Captivate, etc.), editing media (Audio, Video, Graphics, etc.) and the rest on analysis, instructional design, storyboards, etc.
It should be noted that if you have never done e-learning before, you should probably expect that you will not be quite as fast as the participants in the study. You will need time to get to know the tools and processes. Likewise, it is probably not advisable to start by wanting to do very advanced e-learning if you are a beginner – but it gives itself a little, doesn't it?
It is our experience that most elearning that is done falls somewhere between the high end of Level 1 and the low end of Level 2. This means that one hour of “standard elearning” takes between 80 and 140 hours of work to do.
REMEMBER that there is not necessarily a correlation between how long it takes to make a course and how relevant it is to the users and how much they learn from it. We have seen courses that were at the top of Level 3 that were useless, and small simple courses that were good and relevant.
Credit to Chapman Alliance for this very valuable resource:
How Long Does it Take to Create Learning? by Chapman Alliance is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at https://www.chapmanalliance.com
Check out the Chapman Alliance slides ( https://www.chapmanalliance.com/howlong/ ) for a more detailed breakdown of the distribution of the different tasks.
Do you want to? learn more?
If you want to know more about digital learning and e-learning, you can start with our E-learning FAQ
If you are interested in reading more about motivation and learning, these articles may interest you.
- Self-determination theory. The most important theory you need to know about learning.
- Coercive design – how not to design e-learning .
- Which learning methods best support motivation for learning?
- Your brain is NOT a computer - Predictive Coding
- Flick 2 learn. Why Interactive elearning is NOT always exciting elearning
Are you looking for help with developing e-learning , or would you like a course on e-learning where you learn how to create e-learning yourself - we can also help you.