What is the cost of creating and running a MOOC? And how much money is your College or University willing to invest in it to develop distance learners’ skills?
A post on Linkedin has gotten our attention.
- University of Texas says their cost is $100k to $300k per course.
- Teachers College at Columbia University estimates them to range from $39k to $204k each.
- Harvard’s costs range from $75k to $150k.
- Cornell says that the cost of supporting a MOOC instructor, materials, and teaching assistant is about $50k.
- Udacity reports costs of $200k to produce a course, plus $50K to run it subsequently. And costs are only expected to rise, they say.
- edX gives grants of $50k for creating a course within its “High School Program”.
The two main cost components are course creation (faculty, admins, instructional designers, technical support) and the type of delivery. It is generally estimated that the cost of a high quality video production is approximately $4,300 per hour of finished video.
On average, $70k is the cost to produce a course; the delivery costs range from $10-20 per learner to access the course on Amazon or internal servers.
