What is the ratio of development to delivery time?

Recently on some of the forums I follow there has been a debate on how long it takes to develop a training courses. Or what is the number of development hours per delivery hour.

Before the debate is even started we need to understand that design for a one off one day event will be very different from a one day event which will be run several or 100s of times, and this will be different again depending on who will lead these events. If the event is to be “led” via e-learning or some other technology then the development time is very different again.

One of the people discussing the issue pointed to an article written by Janet Clarey – http://www.brandon-hall.com/workplacelearningtoday/?p=6662 in the post Clarey shows a table outlining some research from Karl Kapp, along with Robyn Defelice, who jointly wrote an article for ASTD’s Learning Circuits called “Time to Develop One Hour of Training.” The results came from just 47 respondents, 83% of which had a degree in a field related to instructional technology/design.

It is a shame that the sample size is so small, and yet some of the times listed here are much greater than a trainer in the UK would propose for developing a classroom based course.

You can read the full original article.

Interestingly the author also points to some additional research entitled: “What e-Learning Tool are You Using” – however when you go to the page, it seems to auto redirect to another article without much opportunity to see the content.

On this article is a table from the same research looking at the tools used for developing e-learning solutions. This makes for interesting reading:

This is very worrying, as while power-point may be used for some short light touch e-learning, does word have a place at all?

This list does not suggest that developers are writing and deploying interactive or engaging learning interventions at all.

So what is the standard time for developing one hour of training?  it is what ever it takes you in the given cirmstances..

• how much do you know about the subject?
• how much do your learners know about the subject?
• is this a one off or large scale programme?
• who will be leading the training? one, few or many different people?
• what delivery medium will be used? – classroom, virtual classroom, e-learning – other?
• etc. . .