A average 1-hour interactive elearning course will take 197 hours to develop. But development of a 1-hour elearning course can range between 49 hours for the low end of the range of a “basic” course to 716 hours for the high end of the range of an “advanced” course.
A average 1-hour interactive elearning course will take 197 hours to develop. But development of a 1-hour elearning course can range between 49 hours for the low end of the range of a “basic” course to 716 hours for the high end of the range of an “advanced” course.
Apr 29, 2022 · 267h. 716h. As observed in each level, the more interactive the program, the longer it will take to be developed. An example is on a Level 2 program; average interactivity will require 184 hours to develop one hour of finished course.
Dec 10, 2019 · Depending on the level of interactivity and custom engagement, your project infrastructure and more, developing a new course can take anywhere (truthfully), from 20 to 200 hours. How long it’s taken me to build eLearning courses: My shortest turnaround time to develop, test and publish an eLearning course was one week.
If it is a simple text based course or a PowerPoint slide show it could take a few hours to create. If there is video, audio or interactivity it could take upwards of 100 hours to create. It all depends on the content and complexity of the course..
| Type of Training per 1 hour | Low Hours Per hour of Instruction (2009) |
|---|---|
| Text-only; limited interactivity; no animations | 93 |
| Moderate interactivity; limited animations | 122 |
| High interactivity; multiple animations | 154 |
| E-learning Developed within a Template |
You want to make sure you account for every minute of your eLearning course.
Most eLearning course models rate the training programs based on the levels of interactivity in the program.
It’s good to add here that the level interactivity of your eLearning course depends on pre-established factors like the stakeholders involved, resources available, and what your course is about.
A common challenge eLearning and Training developers face is that of effectively estimating how many hours their eLearning course development will need.
An example is on a Level 2 program; average interactivity will require 184 hours to develop one hour of finished course.
Each module can have 3 to 10 individual lessons within it which hold a related subject or step in the learning.
Just in case you’re wondering about the length because anything shorter might fall short of learning delivery, you can have a longer course as long as you’re splitting it up into different sections (or chapters or modules).
It is an obvious fact that a one-hour eLearning course would take more time to develop than a 20-minute eLearning course. Readiness of the material. A course will take lesser time to develop if the materials available for the development are in a much better phase than a fresh initiative which would consume plenty of time scoping and researching. ...
The primary factors that influence the elapsed time include: How many stakeholders are involved. In case there are a large number of stakeholders involved, it is quite natural for the development time to increase by leaps and bounds.
For example according to ATD report to develop one hour trainer standup training program will require 43 hours. So if it is 24 hour scale that means almost 2 days.
On pages 27-33 are the estimates for determining development time, especially for media-rich content.
“Project management for trainers by Lou Russell.
The scale is an 8 hour day, so that is around one week. Many things come into consideration, such as how complex the materials and slides and activities are. So it could be less time (or possibly more).
Most elearning modules created by study participants are about 20 minutes long. 2017 research on the time to create one hour of learning.
Authoring/Programming is 18% or 99 hours. That seems low for building in Captivate or Storyline, based on my experience, even assuming that we rely heavily on templates. IconLogic’s estimate is 2 hours per finished minute (120:1), or 360 hours. That’s a big discrepancy between the benchmarks. For my work, there’s some overlap between creating the template and authoring, so I can probably reduce this from the IconLogic estimate. I’ll split the difference and call this 180 hours.
Project Management is also 6% or 33 hours . How much project management I do varies depending on the project and who else is on the team. I’ll assume 20 hours for this example.
QA Testing is 6% or 33 hours. Again, I think this is part of the difference in the IconLogic benchmark, since it doesn’t split testing out as a separate task. Generally a full review of a course takes me 2-3 times the length of the course, plus testing interactions throughout the process.
Front end analysis is 9% of 552 or about 50 hours. The analysis involves other stakeholders, so it’s not just my time. I’ll call this analysis 30 hours.
What I found when creating my courses - everything from meeting with SME's all the way through adding the course to my LMS it takes anywhere between 30-60 minutes for every 1 minute of the course . That includes:
In my business we do a lot of 30-45 minute interactive technical training modules. Module architecture is set by the "Online University" venue, but generally consists of 5 or 6 sections with each section followed by a quiz. Each module project begins with objective setting, planning and mind mapping done with the SMEs & client stakeholders followed by an SME data dump. Subsequent interaction with the SMEs occurs at each milestone, often resulting in (limited) edits and reiteration. We generally budget 160 total implementation hours per module. Actual implementation time takes longer due to client sign-off delays at the end of each activity. In 8 years the implementation time hasn't deviated more than +/- 20 hours on any given project.
Building the Articulate file (Adding the scenes, slides, text, images, and animations): (+/- 2 hours) Photoshop (or imagery manipulation): (+/- 8 to 16 hours) Video work and syncing audio narration: (+/-16 to 48 hours, depending on the amount of videos per course.
effort vs duration - effort is the time it takes to do the task, duration is the time it takes for the task to be done. It may take you 3 hours of worth of work to do something, but you do 1 hour this week, and 2 hours next week so the duration of the task is 2 weeks, but it is only 3 hours of work.
Development to Output is faster once there is good preparation done.
Most experts base estimates for how long it will take to devise an eLearning program on the number of employee hours it would take to create one hour of instruction.
Like Kapp, Chapman splits his estimates based on the complexity of the eLearning program. He establishes three groupings ranging from Level 1 to Level 3, with Level 1 being the most uncomplicated, typically utilizing content pages, text, test questions, graphics, possibly basic audio and video as well.
Northpass is the learning platform that gives businesses the freedom to easily create, manage and scale their learning programs exactly the way they want.
Creating online training modules can seem like an overwhelming process but it doesn’t have to be one. Just as some of the most prominent tech companies today started with a couple of friends, a single product idea and a whiteboard, company training departments and operations teams can use an agile approach to build their online training from scratch.
Further, online training is no longer a new industry. The field now boasts many more experienced digital Instructional Design professionals and tech experts available to help expedite eLearning development, not to mention course authoring software that makes many of the steps involved easier to create courses, measure results, and prove the ROI of your program.
I refer to the eLearning levels as 1 for low interactivity, 2 for moderate interactivity, and 3 for high interactivity, like it is done in the Chapman report.
As a rule of thumb, in an hour of training, I aim to cover 2-3 “big” topics including presentation, reflection (discussion or interaction), and application. The advantage of thinking about scope is that you can take a training request that comes in as a list of topics and put together a rough estimate of how many hours the total project will take.
That was an “add 50%” situation! More often, you will be able to pair an inexperienced ID with a more senior member of your team. You will want to add in time for reviews and revisions as the new member of your team gets up to speed.