THE MYTHICAL COURSEWARE DEVELOPMENT TO DELIVERY TIME RATIO

This paper investigates the limitations of the cornerstone metric of C BT and multimedia courseware-the 'development to delivery time ratio'. Impressive claims for increased productivity have been made for the d evelopment of courseware over the last few years. Does this reflect va riability in the end product, the development environment or in the de finition of terms? The authors explore this problem by carefully defin ing the terms used to measure elapsed time, development time, effort, learner time, productivity and effort to learner time ratio. Appropria te units of measurement are also defined for each of the metrics. The framework is then used to evaluate the weaknesses of using any metrics based on the measurement of learner time.