It seems like a simple question: How long does it take to develop an e-learning course? Unfortunately, it’s not so simple. In addition to not being so simple, that is likely the wrong question.
Why?
It’s too general, and no answer to the question would be accurate. It would be more accurate to ask how long it takes to develop e-learning on the topic or problem you need to solve.
Another issue with that question is that it overlooks the other steps necessary to create effective training.
Development isn’t the only step and is not what takes the longest when creating training.
But maybe it’s a more abstract question, and you’re just looking for an estimate to develop 15, 30, or one hour of e-learning. Even that is impossible to answer. Then there’s the fact that it takes more time to create something simple and concise than it does to create something longer, more verbose, and less effective.
If I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter.
Who knows?
It almost without fail always takes longer to develop something shorter than it does longer. And, with training, the goal should always be to create something shorter rather than longer.
Several factors contribute to the time it takes to develop e-learning. Before we get too far down that rabbit hole, it’s essential to understand what exactly e-learning development is, since you cannot confuse it with instructional design.
A topic that’s complex enough to be one hour or more should be broken up into more manageable courses that create a curriculum. It’s not possible to become an expert in one session; that takes time. But that’s rarely the goal of any training.
That’s why it’s necessary to break content up into chunks. Perhaps the goal for the majority of users is to teach them the essentials for their role, but this doesn’t make them experts. Another tier of people may be few in number, but they need to become experts.
Depending on the number of experts needed, dealing with that tier through coaching could be more efficient if only a few exist. E-learning is only efficient in designing and developing if the time required to design is less than the time employees save. With ten people, that’s a considerable challenge (if not impossible).
What Is E-Learning Development?
This may be why some people are confused about how long it takes to develop e-learning. E-learning is part of a more extensive process known as instructional design. To examine it in isolation from the instructional design process is deceptive at best.
The instructional design process comprises many steps, and development is just one of them. Developing e-learning is relatively quick, thanks to rapid development tools, but it’s not what takes the longest to create good training.
E-learning development is the task of taking the plan that comes from analysis and design of a training project and making it come to life.
That means e-learning development doesn’t take long because you’re working from a well-documented and thought-through plan. e-learning development is a small part of a bigger process. After completing the analysis and design steps, we develop the e-learning content, which typically takes two to four weeks to complete.
That time is similar to when we are tasked with converting a PowerPoint deck into an e-learning course. While we do shy away from projects like this, a PowerPoint deck can be easily converted into e-learning, cleaned up, and enhanced with some interaction, allowing it to be completed in a few weeks rather than a few months.
The problem is that e-learning development isn’t a complete process, and converting PowerPoints into e-learning isn’t an effective way to solve training problems. It leaves many of the most essential steps of creating training out of the picture.
Creating an excellent e-learning course requires more than just e-learning development. It also requires the analysis and design phases.
The development process of e-learning used to take a long time, but with the advent of rapid e-learning development tools like Storyline and Captivate, development has been reduced tremendously. However, the time required to complete other steps of the instructional design process has not been accelerated.
E-learning development used to require programmers, graphic designers, and possibly web designers, among others. Now, it requires just one or two people with a rapid development tool, and it takes less than half the time.
To understand why the question of how long it takes to develop e-learning is the wrong question, you need to know everything involved in developing a custom self-paced e-learning course.
What Else Is Necessary to Produce E-Learning
E-learning development is one small part of a larger process. Sometimes, that means an e-learning developer takes a plan from an instructional designer and brings it to life.
Now more than ever, every step of the e-learning development process is handled by a single person. That person should be an instructional designer who knows the process and can work methodically through it.
Instructional designers employ a thorough process that can be boiled down to its simplest terms as ADDIE, an acronym for Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate, which remains the gold standard model for instructional design.
Development is one small step in a larger process. Without a plan, development is misguided at best.
See the development step? That’s where e-learning development comes in. It’s one small part of the process, but it’s important, but far from the most important.
ADDIE is a process for a reason; you can’t simply skip steps and expect a good e-learning course or the best results. Heck, you might even be shooting for the wrong results entirely without analyzing them properly. Or you could create something that doesn’t move the needle at all or harms employees.
Skipping a step would be akin to trying to build a structure without blueprints or figuring out its goal. The result would be a huge mess trying to solve the wrong problem, if it solves a problem at all.
In today’s world of rapid development, here is who typically performs each step of the process.
- Analysis: Instructional designer or a training program manager.
- Design: Instructional designer
- Development: Instructional designer or e-learning developer.
- Implement: Instructional designer and other learning & development roles.
- Evaluate: Instructional Designer and/or other learning & development roles.
The performance of each one can vary significantly, but this is generally close to accurate. You also can’t forget that none of these steps occur in a silo. It’s a group effort, and it’s always necessary to work with stakeholders and subject matter experts (SMEs) during each step.
As you can see, e-learning development is one small step in a process, so it’s impossible to say how long it takes to develop one hour of e-learning.
In a bit, I’ll cover a few scenarios that will help you better understand how long it takes. Just know that it’s never simple and, unfortunately, cannot be classified simply into a categorized table (with vague levels of interaction), no matter how much you see it attempted online.
Factors That Affect Development Time
Several factors can impact the development of e-learning. It depends on how complex it is, how many subject matter experts are available, and whether all the content is available or requires some internet sleuthing.
If e-learning is simply a step in the ADDIE process, it will take much less time than the entire project. Analysis and design consume the majority of time in creating e-learning. Depending on the responsiveness of SMEs and stakeholders, those two steps alone can take two to four months.
Regarding e-learning development, a simple project can take only two weeks. However, that isn’t realistic in most cases, at least for quality e-learning.
Then there’s the fact that no project work is done straight through. That means there’s always communication, collaboration, downtime, admin time, etc. So, while some try to boil a project down to the number of hours, that isn’t realistic or productive. Any project or work that is boiled down to hours will be poorly done and poorly planned.
Output is more important than hours.
Nobody receives quality work when work is reduced to hours rather than the output. The amount of time it takes is irrelevant, except for project deadlines.
It’s all about the results.
From a project management perspective, developing an e-learning course in 100 hours is unrealistic. Nobody can work on e-learning straight through; there’s active time and passive time.
Let’s take a look at those two.
Active Development
This applies specifically to e-learning development, not the broader self-paced course process. If an e-learning developer works with an instructional designer, strictly having active development time may be possible.
Active development time involves creating an e-learning course or finding content for it. If an e-learning developer gets handed off a plan from an instructional designer, they have almost everything ready to go for them.
That means they have the copy already finished and the plan for how everything should look. Sometimes, they may even receive multimedia content such as images and videos. It’s up to the e-learning developer to put it all together and modify the multimedia to make it look a little prettier or better fit the course.
How realistic is that, though?
Collaboration is required, many questions need to be answered, and even with the best-created plan, not everything will always be accounted for. That means a lot of idle time in a project where nothing will be done in the course.
Passive Time
This isn’t development at all. Many projects will involve back-and-forth communication, meetings to ask questions, and simply searching for the right image.
If the instructional designer isn’t doing e-learning dev, there’s probably a bit of back and forth. The e-learning developer might need to go to the instructional designer for something to which they might not have the answer. If that’s the case, then it could be a long process of waiting, meeting, and more waiting.
If it takes 40 hours to develop e-learning, it should be done in one week, right?
Wrong. In reality, 40 hours of e-learning development can easily take two or even three weeks.
Sometimes, the quality expectations for e-learning aren’t high, though. It may be as simple as converting PowerPoint into e-learning with some cleanup. While that’s likely a horrible experience for users, it’s sometimes all that’s required or financially viable. In that case, there’s little passive time, only active development.
It’s sometimes more helpful to look at an actual scenario for developing e-learning. While we go through the process for most clients, breaking out the time needed for development is relatively easy. Remember, it will not always be based on the number of hours, since that’s not a realistic measurement.
Examples Of How Long It Takes to Develop E-Learning
There are many different types of e-learning, including those with varying levels of interactivity and complexity in their design. If it’s a comic book style that requires custom images, it will take much longer than stock photos. It can even vary between computer software simulations. If recreating a software simulation is very complex, e-learning will take longer to develop than a straight walkthrough with no scenarios or complexity.
That’s pretty boring, though.
More complex e-learning requires the full process, not just development.
In each category, I’ve compiled a few real-life estimates of the time it takes to develop e-learning content. Just don’t forget that much more happened before e-learning development to achieve higher-quality output. Without a purpose and a plan, e-learning is nothing.
Remember that all our time estimates are based on the ability to accept the work and begin immediately. That may not always be possible with prior commitments and the inability to start immediately.
PowerPoint Flip
We despise these projects for various reasons. First, they avoid the instructional design process, which never creates good learning outcomes. They’re also highly unengaging, provide little value, and risk much of the content being irrelevant.
However, putting our dislike of them aside, they’re the quickest to develop if the audio is already recorded and included in the PowerPoint or a well-labeled folder (i.e., which audio file corresponds to which slide). Then, a PowerPoint flip can be completed in one to two weeks.
If audio needs to be recorded, that can add a few days to the project if done in-house or (shudder) by AI or a week or so if done professionally and the turnaround isn’t within a few days.
Most work on PowerPoint flips involves cleaning up the content so it looks good when output as an e-learning course for an LMS and functions as required.
Pretty straightforward, right?
In a way, yes, but don’t expect any significant movement in learning, just the simplicity of delivering the content.
Reading With Minimal Graphics
This one is somewhat similar to a PowerPoint flip. The content might originate from a PowerPoint presentation, but instead of being a click-through e-learning course, it could be a scroll-through. That means similar topics are grouped, and users scroll through them rather than getting only part of a topic on each slide.
Using a tool like Articulate Rise, bundling a course in a website-like package for an LMS is easy. That also means they’re typically mobile-friendly (aka mobile learning or mLearning). Each topic can be scrolled through to completion, and then the user clicks to the next topic. No more next button required!
Okay, that’s no more impressive than a next button.
Users scroll through and read the content; occasionally, an image is included to illustrate the text, etc. Maybe you even throw in one or two questions.
If the instructional design process is skipped (please don’t do this), this project should take no more than two weeks. With some activities added, allow for an additional week or so for development, provided all logistics and content are in place.
As you can see, these two types of projects aren’t very interactive and take little time if no proper analysis or design is done.
The content won’t be amazing and may be long, verbose, boring, and ineffective. However, it’s cheap and simple to create, which may be sufficient if the audience is small and there’s little to gain from a robust instructional design process.
Computer Software Simulation
We start getting a bit more complex here, but even this varies. We specialize in all levels of complexity for software simulations for company technology, so we know this one well. A linear software walkthrough takes much less time than a complex simulation with many variables or a scenario-based e-learning software simulation. We’ve done both, so here are our time estimates.
Creating a software simulation that allows users to test out of the course is also more complex. It essentially requires creating two courses in one.
Linear Software Simulation
Some software systems are relatively simple, and learning them is a fairly linear process. We recently developed an e-learning course for social workers in a medical setting who assist their patients in obtaining transplants. The course involves several processes but is relatively linear overall.
- Create a new transplant referral.
- Continue a transplant referral.
- Find a transplant referral based on the transplant location.
While there are a few twists, for example, the user must save the new transplant referral and then continue it later, the course is still relatively linear.
These types of e-learning courses take about three to five weeks to develop. That means the content has been thoroughly reviewed (we did that), the audio has been recorded (done in-house), and we have a training environment ready to go.
Linear With Test Out
Sometimes, a test-out option is created for these courses with specific audiences in mind. One course we built was for a technical crowd. Support desk staff were getting a new system to log into employee computers for support calls remotely.
I’m technical, so I would be fine without taking the entire course. In fact, I might feel insulted to have to go through the whole process just to access the tool. That’s why we built a function that allows technicians to take a test and demonstrate how it all works without actually taking the course. If they didn’t pass, they had to take the parts of the course relevant to their weaknesses.
This process saves employees a significant amount of time, as they can breeze through it if they are already familiar with the content. Instead of 20 to 30 minutes, it could take them less than 10 minutes to complete the required course.
How long does that take to build?
More planning is involved with this, but for the development side, three to five weeks of a normal simulation turns into five to seven weeks.
Complex Variable Simulation
Computer programs aren’t always straightforward. As you change them or work through processes, other processes may change. One such computer simulation we developed recently was complex in this way. While there are varying degrees of complex software, this was on the lower end.
It was an e-learning course for recruiters who needed to work through temp timecards daily using this system. We recreated the system in a course to allow the recruiter to choose how they proceeded through the course.
They could choose which type of alert they worked through and even build their emails with blocks. These emails enabled them to contact temporary employees who could provide the necessary information. The complex and open-ended course allowed them to choose their adventure.
The more complex level of computer simulation can take anywhere from six to eight weeks to develop.
Wrap Up
These are all estimates and can never entirely answer how long it takes to develop e-learning. We’ve done our best to provide you with some realistic scenarios that we’ve described to help you better understand timing.
One of the most important things you can understand in these and all estimates for developing e-learning is that it’s not an isolated process. While e-learning development can be performed in isolation from the larger process, much training effectiveness will be lost. This should only be done when risks are low and the benefits of better training are limited.
E-learning development isn’t an isolated process. Good e-learning is reliant on a more thorough instructional design process.
Developing an e-learning course can take anywhere from two to eight weeks or more. But anything but a PowerPoint presentation or reading with minimal graphics requires a more robust process that will take much longer. You can’t skip the process for more complex e-learning that demands positive performance results.
Even if you have plans for simple training, whether a project manager or change manager, it’s always helpful to bring training professionals into a project as early as possible, at least for a consultation. That ensures that training professionals can accurately estimate the time required to create training for your project.
If you think training might be required or would like to find out, schedule a free consultation. We can discuss your project and help you make the best decision. We’re always ready for a quick consultation to review your requirements, and we always have instructional design consultants prepared for a more in-depth analysis that will help put your project on the right path to success.