The Flashlight Program recently finished writing a new handbook to help institutions make decisions about the resources needed for technology use in teaching and learning. Now it wants to choose just one of those methods. One of several types of information would be about the resources required in each case. Helping to write the Handbook was quite an education for me. I wanted to share an insight I learned from helping to write it.
Costs vary a lot from one place to another.
It's not enough to find out how much it costs another institution to do something. You need to study your own costs, too. Costs are not always what they seem. One group of experienced faculty believed they were spending more time teaching students at a distance than students on campus. But when the faculty themselves made a more careful estimate of how they were spending their own time, it turned out that they spent about the same amount of time.