Resources for Finding Out How Long it Takes to Develop eLearning

A question I am constantly asked is “How long does it take to develop…” you can fill in the rest with Instructor-led training, elearning, simulations, etc.

Several people have attempted to answer that question in 2003 I gathered data and information about the times it takes to develop instruction and then my colleague Robyn Defelice and I explored the idea in 2009.

You can find a table of our results in an article we wrote Time to Develop One Hour of Training for example we found that to create one hour of high interactivity; multiple animations within a template took between 136 and 324 hours (big range) those hours include everything from analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation.

Then people wanted to know “Why does it take so long?” so we wrote a follow up article, Reducing the Time to Develop One Hour of Instruction where Robyn and I looked at several reasons why it take so long and suggested some ideas to reduce that time.

In 2010, Bryan Chapman of The Chapman Alliance released a wonderful, detailed breakdown of the hours needed to create instruction and assigned percentages to each element such as Front End Analysis, Storyboarding, Instructional Design, Authoring/Programming, pilot testing, Quality Assurance, etc.

Great detailed breakdown. These two sources should give you lots of solid information to answer the question “how long to development one hour of …”