Here is a scenario...

Let's say you are considered an expert in the eLearning field and a prospect informs you that they have heard that it only takes 5-6 days to
develop a 1 Hour eLearning program (software simulation training). How would you respond?

Now let's say you educate them and tell them how long it really takes to develop a 1 hour eLearning program. They have a hard time believing that!

Here is an article showing how long it takes on average...

How Long Does it Take to Create E-Learning? There are no set measurements on how long it takes to create e-learning. It depends on the content, resources available, level of interactivity, and capabilities of the developer. One source says creating a one-hour e-learning course averages about 250 hours of development time.

Acceptable production times are approximately 8-12 weeks for one hour of training, 12-16 weeks for two hours of training, and 16-20 weeks for three hours of training (Codone, p.14). This is consistent with this author’s experience on an interactive course utilizing a team of people. Bryan Chapman, chief learning strategist and consultant/researcher through alliance with Brandon Hall Research, provides the following benchmarks...http://6clearning.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html

The bottom line is it sounds like this prospect is looking for the best price in town and shortest development time as possible. Sound familiar?

Hi Stets -- Sounds to me like it's time to pull out The Triangle...

Money
Time
Quality

Each is dependent on the others and impacted by the others. For example, if you reduce time, you will end up decreasing quality and could increase the amount of money it takes (because, for example, you need more people to get the task done). If you pull back on money, you'll need more time because you wont be able to afford the extra resources and you'll definitely (again) decrease quality.

Totally agree with you!

Quality, and also "learning/performance improvement" is key. In order to get this, you have to invest the time and money.

Quality takes time. In the long run, there are things you can do to shorten development time, but an effective program worth the expense will be time consuming - it's not quite as simple as slapping together a PowerPoint deck!

One of the ways we reduced development time is by creating a standardized, reuseable framework in both Flash and Authorware. With Authorware, we created our own "model" so when begin a new project, we just drag it on to the timeline. Because the model includes the GUI, complete with navigation buttons, etc), this saves a huge amount of time. We did the same for our Flash-based framework. For consistency, both the Flash and Authorware frameworks have the same look & feel.

However, even though we have the pre-built framework to use, filling in the content and any additional programming is time consuming. Just creating/gathering the resources (Screenshots, captions, voiceovers, etc)takes a good deal of time, and then you still have to put it together and make it work.