Staffing and Costs

Currently the Introduction to Midwifery Course has four facilitators attached to it, 2 in the South Island and 2 in the North Island. Their duties related to the course are development of resources, teaching in face to face sessions (3days), marking of assessments, contribution and supervision of forum posts, administration.

As the course is staffed from within the Midwifery dept, which operates its own uniquely developed workload allocation system, it is difficult to ascertain a direct staffing cost per the program. However what can be seen is that there are 4 staff for 3 days of face to face teaching, this is the equivalent of 12 teaching days and admin and marking would need to allocated staff time on top of these days.

Also another current cost to the course is that the staff and students are widely geographically spread. This means that both staff and students can travel great distances to attend the face to face sessions, adding cost for the students and costs to the employer for the staff as well as the time spent in travel.

Switching the course to online would mean that you could potentially reduce the number of staff involved in the course, thus allowing some freeing up of schedules, eliminate the need to travel, reducing costs and potentially allowing students anywhere in the world to participate.

Yet we should be cautious to see online education as the money saving alternative. There would need to be money spent on the development of the course and the resources, plus there would still be a staff allocation needed to supervise the forum discussions, address any questions and mark the final assessment if it stays as an essay.

While a more detailed analysis would need to be done regarding any cost savings of making the course online, it could be seen as a more sustainable option both from a student and employer perspective. Otago Polytechnic in 2004, committed to becoming a sustainable organisation and a leader in the field of education for sustainability by weaving education for sustainability into each programme of study (OP Leadership Team, 2004), this would therefore support the development of this course in an online format.

Reference:
Otago Polytechnic Leadership Team. (2004). Education for sustainability at Otago Polytechnic. Retrieved from http://www.otagopolytechnic.ac.nz/about/sustainable-practice/education-for-sustainability.html