How Much Time Should I Estimate For eLearning Course Development?

​Planning to develop an eLearning course? Then you’ll want to know how much time it will take. The answer: It depends. eLearning courses range in duration (how long it takes a typical learner to complete) as well as development hours. 

Do you know how much time and effort your organization spends on a typical, 30-minute eLearning course build? 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. It was a simple Occupational Health and Safety lockdown procedure built in Articulate Rise for a head office that took one week of 0.75 full-time work. Essentially, learners spend 15 minutes completing a course that took me (and a few hours of the SME’s time) approximately 26-30 hours.
• The longest development time for any project I’ve worked on was 16 months. I helped prepare the first storyboard draft of the very first online course for health care providers for a non-profit organization. That’s almost a year and a half of 0.5 full-time work. Yikes! It was built to be a minimum of 4-6 hours of learning time, around 800+ hours of my time alone.

All other projects in between varied widely in development time too, based on these common factors:

• Preparedness and availability of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), as well as the number of SMEs involved (The more SMEs, the longer development takes)
• Complexity of content
• Complexity of engagement activities
• Flexibility of the tool used to author the course, combined with the experience and skill of the course developers themselves
• State of content (approved and static versus in discussion and dynamic)

Pro tip: The biggest mistake most organizations make is desiring a highly interactive course, but underestimating how long it takes to develop. Create your estimates on evidence-based resources such research from the Chapman Alliance. Be wary of internal teams or contractors that can promise you a complex course in a tighter timeline—chances are the project won’t be on time or budget, and might not be what you hoped for. 

This is why I recommend starting with a small scoping project to test if your budget, project plan, or contractor-client relationship are aligned. 

Contact me for an estimate