By participating in this online seminar, you’ll learn how to:

• Determine billable hours and rates
• Allocate resources to individual courses
• Consolidate individual course budgets into program-level budgets and then into overall unit budgets
• Track key milestones in development across several functional units
• Weigh the impact of media on course development budgeted costs
• Understand how the Teach Act affects copyrighted material issues

Meet the presenter:

Rick Shearer is the assistant director of instructional design and development at The Pennsylvania State University’s World Campus. He is responsible for overseeing project management, budgeting, and resource allocation for courses developed and delivered through World Campus.

Shearer has been involved in distance education for more than 20 years. He has developed distance education courses for computer-based instruction, educational television, traditional print correspondence courses, two-way interactive video, and the internet. Mr. Shearer has worked for both private and public higher education institutions and has consulted on distance education projects with community colleges and public school systems. His research interests include systems dynamic modeling of distance education processes, learner control in distance education, interaction analysis, and current policy issues surrounding accreditation and copyright law. Mr. Shearer has published several articles and book chapters on distance education and presented at numerous conferences.

In addition to his work in distance education Mr. Shearer as been involved with institutional research initiatives within higher education and has helped design a number of studio classrooms and video teleconferencing facilities. He has also worked at the executive level for corporations. Before joining Penn State, he was the director of research and instructional systems at National University.