AT a 1997 meeting, several members of the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunication's (WCET) Steering Committee were visibly squirming. They were under pressure back home to provide data on the costs of using these new-fangled educational technologies. Legislators in one state wanted data on the effectiveness of their investment in a statewide telecommunications network. Faculty in another wondered about the costs of implementing educational technologies. Another state's governor imposed performance audits on all state entities, which included cost analyses. Since higher education is notorious for its inability to cost any non-sporting activity that happens on campus, it is easy to understand their discomfort.

In trying to develop a response for our Steering Committee, we contacted Dennis Jones of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS). He told us that it was difficult to determine "effectiveness," "performance," or "savings" without a generally accepted methodology for determining the costs of alternative models of delivery. NCHEMS and WCET partnered to propose the Technology Costing Methodology (TCM) project to create such a tool.

TCM is an authoritative costing analysis tool, including standard definitions of cost categories, for institutions and multi-institutional agencies to: a) analyze the costs of instructional approaches that make heavy use of technology; and b) to legitimately compare cost data for different instructional approaches.

TCM is not a set of accounting protocols. TCM is a tool for analyzing educational technology costs. Since campuses vary widely in their accounting software and procedures, creating an accounting tool useful to more than a handful of institutions would be impossible. Instead, TCM allows costing data to be transformed into a standard format for comparisons. TCM is not a cost/benefit analysis. Since definitions of "quality" and "benefits" vary widely, these determinations are left to the campus. TCM focuses on measuring costs.

Marianne Boeke
(303) 541-0310
mboeke@wcet.info

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Updated 04/03/2002