Cost of Delivering Courses via Distance Education, The

NACTA Journal, Jun 2005 by Sterns, James, Wysocki, Allen, Comer, Dorothy A, Fairchild, Gary, Thornsbury, Suzanne

The comparisons summarized in the Tables do not document all of the nuances of cost estimates. For example, instructors who chose to deliver their courses using primarily interactive video incurred lower development cost than those delivered via the Internet (even though the department and college incurred higher operating costs with this technology). This is not surprising because an instructor who uses interactive video does not need to do much to modify an on-campus course. In this case, the instructor is primarily talking to a camera rather than to a room full of students. Interactive video courses can be supplemented with web delivery of course content to facilitate learning, student-instructor interaction, and the logistics of moving information to students, but these web-sites take a considerable amount of time to develop and maintain. In fact, the most costly approach to distance education would be the combination of interactive video, web-site delivery and internet chat and email. Interactive video has high technical costs and user fees, web-site delivery has high development costs, and internet chat and email create very time-intensive demands on faculty time a troika of costs. The authors recognize that universities vary in how these costs are administered. For example, some institutions may place a social value on offering courses via distance education and not charge for delivery and development costs. These situations still require an accurate accounting of the actual and opportunity costs involved with delivering a distance education program, and are therefore included in the analysis.

Not surprisingly, from 1998 to 2002, the FRED faculty have demonstrated considerable variation in their approaches to distance technologies, from individual instructors who chose to put up a "shell" site to those who maintained both a full, active website and used interactive video. These choices have been influenced by both individual preferences and the relative level of support and degree of adoption of a given technology by colleagues within the department and the college.

To conclude, the authors' summarize the "takeaway" message of the data in Tables 1 to 4 and the accompanying discussion as follows,

* Courses delivered via distance technologies cost a department more than courses delivered in traditional on-campus formats. Departments are not billed for brick-and-mortar, but they are billed for technology use fees, video-conferencing access, satellite links and other up-front costs associated with distance education;

* Economies of size exist and must be exploited if average per-course and per-student costs are to even begin to approach the lower levels of on-campus average costs;

* Diebel, et al. (1998) provided a first step documentation of costs for one course, taught twice in a two-year period via distance. The analysis in this article provides a needed "next step" in the assessment of the benefits and costs of distance education by documenting the costs for a set of distance courses for one department over a five-year period. Given that interest in distance education remains high among Colleges of Agriculture and Natural Resources (in part because its fit with the historic land grant missions of teaching and outreach), a much broader multistate/province, multi-university study that would quantify costs and benefits across multiple institutions is needed to further clarify the appropriateness of distance education for Colleges of Agriculture and Natural Resources.