Elements of Quality Online Education cation

The Business of Online Education: Are We Cost Competitive?The TeleCampus does not operate as an academic unit. It is, in fact, a department within the Office ofAcademic Affairs at the system administration level. As such, the TeleCampus does not capture or reportits costs in the same fashion as the campuses. Being a relatively small operation, however, it wasrelatively easy to assign analogous costs to the line items identified for the institutions above.TeleCampus cost categories:• Specific TeleCampus staff salaries, those directly involved in the support of the faculty andstudents. Marketing, for example, was excluded.• Infrastructure costs. Represents both in-house and contracted services (course managementsystem, hosting, help desk, academic services).• TeleCampus Digital Library—database subscription and staff costs. The Digital Library is used to“level” access to resources across all the institutions’ digital holdings.• Training costs for faculty and technical support on the campuses.Again, after calculating the cost for TeleCampus course delivery, it was spread across the SCHrepresented by the total number of courses offered.It is important to note that the TeleCampus does not directly employ faculty. The courses offered via theTeleCampus are taught by the faculty of the offering institutions. The vast majority of TeleCampuscourses are taught in-load by campus-based faculty. This means that instructional costs will be the samewhether the course is taught face-to-face on the traditional campus or online through the TeleCampus.Thus, for the purposes of this study, instructional costs have been netted out. This is an important point asmany studies of this type indicate an additional cost for instruction in the online environment due mainlyto overload or other compensation for faculty. The UT System campuses do not typically provideadditional compensation for teaching a course online. Also note that this study did not seek to comparethe amount of hours spent teaching, but rather focused only on the instructional costs as represented bysalaries.D. FindingsThis cost study was conducted in both FY 02 and FY 03. The study shows that, when compared to theacademic components of the UT System, the TeleCampus has a cost of delivery that is within the range ofwhat was found for delivery costs of face-to-face, but it is close to the lower end of that range.178