Faculty medical educators that embark on the development of computerized multimedia teaching products quickly discover that these creations can involve a great deal of invested time. The cost and personnel time required to create a multimedia program have been discussed and well documented in the industry of electronic publishing, and methods for estimating expected timelines and expenses are available. Academicians (and academic administrators) outside of the discipline of electronic publishing are usually surprised, however, to learn the degree of effort these works require. In fact, faculty and staff developers must struggle against attitudes ranging from naiveté, denial or frank disbelief when trying to educate non-developers about the time and effort these products require. The total investment (personnel type, hours, and expenses) has been documented and evaluated during the process of creating a case-based radiology program used in a standard professional veterinary curriculum. Results will be compared to industry standards for electronic publishing. The process has been broken down in integral steps, and evaluated in terms of faculty versus staff time requirements. These types of data are critical when administrators and faculty develop expectations about potential curricular innovations, and assign academic time-equivalency and scholarly value used for workload calculations, annual faculty reviews, promotion, and tenure evaluations. The many factors determining time and cost of product development should be considered carefully at the start of a project so as to make a realistic estimate, especially including complexity of design and nature of the media that must be used to yield a useful product. These factors and methods that can streamline the process and maximize efficiency of multimedia production will be discussed.

BENEFIT TO PARTICIPANTS ATTENDING SESSION:

Tare aspects of multimedia development, which are rarely discussed but are so important to the realities of the production process. Those attending a meeting such as Slice of Life are all enthused about this type of teaching, but the "down side" of time investment should be considered carefully in planning product development. Data such as these should be available for all of us to present to our own administration as we work towards developing respect for this type of creation as a substantial scholarly effort.

Susan Kraft
Radiology Section
Veterinary Teaching Hospital
300 W. Drake
Colorado State University
Fort Collins CO 80523
Phone: 970-491-0350
Fax: 970-491-1254
Email: skraft@colostate.edu