Levels of cost considerations

In general, there are costs for education and training at several levels:

• macro level costs of building and maintaining an educational system;
  
  
• intermediate level costs of operating an educational institution, and of supporting community learning centers and local programs:
  
  
• program and course costs--what it costs a particular provider to offering specific programs or courses to specific populations;
  
  
• costs to the learner; for fees, materials, travel to an educational institution, and reduced income, if paid employment is curtailed in order to have sufficient time for study.

New learning technologies bring additional categories of costs;

• the cost of national and local infrastructures that support the use of educational technologies, for example, the investment in electronic communications and transmission systems:
  
  
• costs to the institution of establishing an institutional infrastructure to use these technologies; for example, costs of equipment acquisition, of system development and training of staff and faculty;
  
  
• costs to the institution of developing specific programs and courses using learning technology;
  
  
• costs to the institution of delivering specific programs and courses using learning technology:
  
  
• costs to the learner, including the cost of obtaining access to these technologies, for example the cost of computers, software, line charges, and so on, and/or the cost of travel to sites where technologies are available.

Some examples of infrastructure costs

It is difficult to estimate the total costs of establishing the infrastructure that supports new technologies, or to determine what proportion of this can be attributed to using new technologies for learning. For example, the Information Highway (the infrastructure, systems and other mechanisms that make it possible provide computer based communication linkages among most places in the country) will be used for a wide range of purposes, including government, business and educational uses, and its development is being funded by a broad range of public and private sector investments.

The federal government's investment in information technology ($3.1 billion in 1992-93, $3.5 billion in 1993-94, $3.6 billion in 1994-95),²⁷ would not necessarily all be directed towards the information highway development, but on the other hand, the federal contribution to information highway developments is by no means the total amount of public and private funding that is being invested in this system.

Investments in computer communications

SchoolNet, the computer based communication systems that is expected to be connected to all schools in Canada by 1998, represents an initial investment in the basic system by the federal government, of $52 million over four years, which does not cover any of the costs associated with linking individual schools to the system. In addition, there are investments by the provincial governments in provision of computers in schools and other technological support systems. For example, in British Columbia, the provincial government is investing $100 million over a 5 year period²⁸ to put more computers and network technology into schools. In New Brunswick, $10,5 million will be invested over a five year period in TeleEducation New Brunswick, of which $6.1 million was allocated to establish and maintain the technological and organizational infrastructure, and $4.4 million was allocated to support up to 50% of the costs of developing courses for distance education.²⁹