Review by: Schönwald, Ingrid (2007-06-06)

The context of this paper was set by the e-learning strategy of the UK’s Department for Education and Skills, which sets four over-arching objectives for the implementation of e-learning in educational systems: personalized learning, inclusion, flexible learning opportunities, and productive time. The paper focuses on two of these objectives (personalization and productivity) and investigates, what these changes will mean for the teachers’ and learners’ time. The aim of the author is to develop a ‘benefits-oriented cost model’ that enables innovators to plan and understand the relationship between the expected learning benefits and the likely teaching costs.

The first part begins by analysing existing approaches to cost modelling and measures of benefits, such as cross-institution approaches, within-institutional approaches and or approaches for a cost-benefit-analysis. The author identifies several limitations in the existing approaches to costing:

• There is no consistency in costing new technology methods across institutions in terms of costs measured
• There is no consistency in the parameters to be used for comparing the costs of new technology with the costs of traditional methods, within an institution
• There is no critical literature: studies that produce conflicting findings do not comment on these discrepancies
• Costing models identify parameters to be costed, but give little help in estimating or measuring these for a particular institution, department, or course
• There is no agreement on how best to identify and compare benefits of new technology against traditional methods

The author concludes that traditional costing studies for new technologies have given little help to innovators and managers because they have tried to give a definitive and generalized answer to the question of whether they are cost-effective which is not possible with an emerging educational innovation. From her critique of existing approaches the author generates a list of seven requirements for a different approach: The model should …

1. Define benefit parameters that can differentiate between old and new methods
2. Define the cost parameters that can be associated with comparative benefits
3. Focus on the major cost driver of staff time
4. Represent value to the learner in terms of use of their time
5. Support the local exploration of the cost-benefit relationship
6. Represent technology-specific benefits
7. Represent benefits in terms of improvements in learning

The main idea of the model is to get beyond retrospective analysis of costs and benefits, and develop instead to an approach that focuses on prospective planning for the internal relation between critical benefits and their related costs. The proposed modelling tool focuses only on the costs linked to staff and student time, and the benefits linked to the types of learning and teaching, and doesn't include benefits such as flexible study times, reach to off-campus students etc.

The default data of the proposed ‘benefits-oriented cost model´ are average values derived from studies in one institution (probably the author's own institution). For local implementation in other universities the costs (in terms of staff and student time) and benefit assumptions (in terms of personalization and quality of active learning experience) have to be checked as costs and benefits depend on the specific institutional context.

The author recommends use the model as a planning tool as it can help to

• clarify thinking about the purpose of a technology-enhanced learning innovation
• identify the key parameters that confer learning benefits
• compare old, new, and blended methods model alternative plans
• support an iterative approach to designing a plan against the cost it generates
• capture the planning in a form that can be communicated and revised
• define the staff resource needed to realise a plan
• assess the per student cost of the teaching time for a course

With the development of her model the author proposes an interesting idea to refresh the old "return-on-investment" discussion in e-learning. It will be interesting to see if and how the model will be implemented (and probably evolved) within a specific university context.