Budgeting Instructional Design Projects
Budget is a major part of developing effective training. Instructional Designers must be able to accurately estimate how much it will cost to develop a training in order to decide if the strategies, type of content and technologies chosen are feasible within budgets set forth by the organization.
For example, if you choose to have video content in your training, will you have the budget to develop original videos that can cost up to $3,000 per edited minute to produce (Piskurich, 2015, p. 44), or is it better to use YouTube content or other pre-made videos? These decisions are important to make even before starting the course design process so that you don’t have to rethink your strategies and content development methods after the fact.
Another thing to consider is how much time, effort, and expertise you will need to develop the content and apply your chosen strategies. These items can also have a huge impact on the project’s budget and delivery time, therefore, must also be examined and determined before beginning the Instructional Design process.
In researching information about how to create estimates for training development, I came across several useful resources that I would like to share.
Tie to Develop One Hour of Training. In this article, Karl Kapp and Robyn Defilice offer detailed information on how to calculate effort for developing training. They make it easy to understand by providing a summary chart of survey results from professionals who developed training in the past. This can be a good historical reference guide for use when estimating.
Estimating Costs and Time in Instructional Design. Here, Donald Clark provides budgets and cost guidelines as well as time estimates for several types of training development.
Time and Cost Considerations in Developing an Online Course. This article by the Center for Education Innovation and the University of Minnesota expounds on information about the different factors to consider when creating a ID budget.
How Long Does it take to Create Learning? This is a slide presentation developed by Bryan Chapman where he summarizes and interprets research on how long it takes to create several kinds of training.
—
References
Piskurich, G.M. (2015). Rapid instructional design: learning ID fast and right. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Publishers. Hoboken, New Jersey.