A complete breakdown of cost of online course development

Choosing a price- A critical step in the online course creation process

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What is the cost of online course development?

An essential part of developing and launching a successful online education program is having relevant content that resonates with and stimulates the minds of your users. Building a world class online course doesn’t only involves filling in hours of paper work, convoluted models, and bloated processes. Apt information regarding cost of online course development also plays a vital role in the development of online course. Paradiso Learning makes it refreshingly easy and straightforward to build and launch a successful online course.

As per a report, cost of online course development is around $4000 to $ 10000 and takes a span of 180 to 360 hours on average to produce one hour of eLearning material. We at Paradiso have the expert knowledge and vital experience needed to help you with this endeavor for knowing cost of online course development.

The cost for developing an online course is an important factor while creating online courses. It might be difficult with so many factors at play: complexity, revisions, level of interactivity. Cost of online course development is widely based on the size of the learner body, the number of instructors, the features, the course’s complexity and interactivity, and more.

One of the major investments in cost to develop an online course is your time.

Factors involved in cost of online course development

Before you invest your time into what is the cost of online course development, take a look at some of the critical parts of course creation you should consider:

Researching your learners

Come up with a list of audiences the online course will cater and what are their expectations from the online course.

Planning your course curriculum

Planning your course curriculum

While developing an online course you need to decide if the required course creation is custom content creation or off the shelf courses for generic information for businesses.

Developing your course content

Next decision you need to make to while figuring out the costs is the type of course you’re creating for your software. Will it be multimedia like live video, video with audio or text based? How long will the online course run?

Developing your course content
Packaging your online course

Packaging your online course

Manage and update your learning content effortlessly with our Corporate LMS. With a centralized system, users can access up-to-date information from anywhere, ensuring they have the latest resources at their fingertips.

Marketing your online course

Marketing and selling your course will probably take a while. To sell the course you need to find the right marketing messages to attract learners and educators.

So, for the cost of online course development, you can expect to pay between $1 (or less) to $10+ per lead. Of course, these costs vary by topic, search terms, and competition in your market space.

Marketing your online course

ADDIE Model and its relation with Online Course Development

Depending on your target market, marketing costs can have an immense impact on your online course’s profitability. The best way to explain the cost of online course development can be the ADDIE model. For professionally developed, high quality education programs, online course developers follow ADDIE model that is mainly applied on an iterative basis, with evaluation leading to re-analysis and further design and development modifications. The ADDIE model stands for; Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate and through this lets gauge how much does it cost to create an online course.

Analysis

In this stage, identification of all the parameters required while designing the course and cost for developing an online course, such as; learners’ prior knowledge, learners’ characteristics, resources available, learning environment, etc. are all considered to begin the course design process.

Phase Specialist Estimated Time
(hrs./1 course video hour)
Hourly rate, $ Estimated costs, $
Analysis or Consultation Stage Educator/Lecturer 5–10 $10 – $40 $50 – $400*
Project Manager 5–10 $30 – $50 $150 – $500
Instructional Designer 5–10 $40 – $60 $200 – $600**

Design

Designing stage involves identifying learning objectives for the course and the cost related to online course development. Further research on how materials will be created and designed for best practices is also taken into consideration. Take for example, in a storyboard outlining what will be covered in text, audio and video and in a certain order will be decided in this phase of designing. In this stage you also decide on the selection and use of technology, such as an LMS, social media platform or only video-based content.

Phase Specialist Estimated Time (hrs/video hour) Hourly Rate ($) Estimated Costs ($)
Designing visual content Educator/Lecturer 20–25 $20–40 $400–1000
Instructional Designer 20–25 $20–40 $400–1000
Graphic Designer 20–25 $25–50 $500–1250
Designing infographics, practical tasks, quizzes, tests Educator/Lecturer 4–5 $25–50 $100–250
Instructional Designer 4–5 $20–50 $100–250

Storyboarding

While creating online course content, an eLearning storyboard makes the eLearning course development process easy and feasible. A storyboard gives you a map to organize your content for better delivery of your content to your audience. Storyboarding helps list the navigation elements, chapters, and introductory/conclusion that users need and how they connect.

Different types of storyboards in eLearning?

Storyboarding comes into use during video production and is also used at a higher level to plan online course. Listed below are three main formats to use for storyboarding:

Marketing your online course

Visual storyboards:

These storyboards are image-based and is helpful to sketch out scenes and production plans in a training video.

Written storyboards:

Text-based storyboarding comes into play when you plan to create simple videos where scenes don’t demand change.

Course mapping storyboards:

These storyboards can be visual or written and also can be used to finalize a high-level outline of online course or a lesson. The learning journey of your learners become much easier as they make their way through it.

Development

The development phase involves the decision to create content, including whether to develop in-house or outsource, the decision to obtain copyright clearance for third-party materials, the cost related to loading the content into a website or LMS, and so on. This stage analyzes the process and cost involved in writing lecture notes, developing practical tasks and quizzes, creating infographics and graphs, or creating content related to video.

Phase Specialist Estimated Time (hrs/1 course video hour) Hourly rate ($) Estimated costs ($)
Writing Lecturer 10–30 $15–25 $150–750
Instructional Designer 10–30 $20–30 $200–900
Shooting Video Lecturer 2–4 $50+ $50–270+
Graphic Designer 2–4 $60+ $50–300+
Video Editor 2–4 $100+ $100–500+
Video Designing Graphic Designer 10–15 $70+ $370–1500+
Video Editor 10–15 $50+ $370–1000+
Editing the videos Video Editor 15–50 $50+ $400–3000+

Implementation

Once the design and development phases are completed, the content or course modules are deployed in your chosen training management software or LMS. Once the quality assurance with the content manager, course manager, and project manager is completed, testing the online course is performed within the team or with some chosen beta testers, such as students.

Phase Specialist Estimated Time Hourly rate, $ Estimated costs, $
Writing Educator/Lecturer 40–50 $10–30 $400–1500
QA Specialist 20–30 $10–30 $200–900

Evaluation

Feedback and required information after testing are gathered to rectify areas that require improvement and feeds into the design of the online course. Development and implementation of the next iteration of the course along with adjusting the content to reach maximum ROI is then performed.

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