An Analysis of the Cost and Cost-Effectiveness of Faculty Development for Online Teaching

Abstract

This article presents the results of a national study of 39 higher education institutions that collected information about their cost measures used to evaluate faculty development for online teaching as well as decisions they would make to expand, keep, scale back, or eliminate various faculty development activities and contents in a budget-cutting situation. Generally, institutions are more likely to expand low marginal cost training (e.g., online modules) and eliminate training content dealing with tools (e.g., Facebook/Twitter). The two most popular cost measures used are dollars per hours of training provided per academic year and dollars spent per new online course per academic year.