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in title, tags, annotations or url

That’s not to say there isn’t any room for humans in Demand’s process. They just aren’t worth very much. First, a crowdsourced team of freelance “title proofers” turn the algorithm’s often awkward or nonsensical phrases into something people will understand: “How to make a church-pew breakfast nook,” for example, becomes “How to make a breakfast nook out of a church pew.” Approved headlines get fed into a password-protected section of Demand’s Web site called Demand Studios, where any Demand freelancer can see what jobs are available. It’s the online equivalent of day laborers waiting in front of Home Depot. Writers can typically select 10 articles at a time; videographers can hoard 40. Nearly every freelancer scrambles to load their assignment queue with titles they can produce quickly and with the least amount of effort — because pay for individual stories is so lousy, only a high-speed, high-volume approach will work. The average writer earns $15 per article for pieces that top out at a few hundred words, and the average filmmaker about $20 per clip, paid weekly via PayPal. Demand also offers revenue sharing on some articles, though it can take months to reach even $15 in such payments. Other freelancers sign up for the chance to copyedit ($2.50 an article), fact-check ($1 an article), approve the quality of a film (25 to 50 cents a video), transcribe ($1 to $2 per video), or offer up their expertise to be quoted or filmed (free). Title proofers get 8 cents a headline. Coming soon: photographers and photo editors. So far, the company has paid out more than $17 million to Demand Studios workers; if the enterprise reaches Rosenblatt’s goal of producing 1 million pieces of content a month, the payouts could easily hit $200 million a year, less than a third of what The New York Times shells out in wages and benefits to produce its roughly 5,000 articles a month.

But once it was automated, every algorithm-generated piece of content produced 4.9 times the revenue of the human-created ideas. So Rosenblatt got rid of the editors. Suddenly, profit on each piece was 20 to 25 times what it had been. It turned out that gut instinct and experience were less effective at predicting what readers and viewers wanted — and worse for the company — than a formula.

Here is the thing that Rosenblatt has since discovered: Online content is not worth very much. This may be a truism, but Rosenblatt has the hard, mathematical proof. It’s right there in black and white, in the Demand Media database — the lifetime value of every story, algorithmically derived, and very, very small. Most media companies are trying hard to increase those numbers, to boost the value of their online content until it matches the amount of money it costs to produce. But Rosenblatt thinks they have it exactly backward. Instead of trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it — perhaps an impossible proposition — the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value.

Reflections of a Teacher and Learner: David teaches kids at a private college in Turkey and he also is a distance student on the University of Manchester’s MA in EdTech & TESOL programme

An A-Z of ELT: This blog is managed by the man who wrote An A-Z of ELT in 2006, Scott Thornbury.

Authentic Teaching: This blogger has taught EFL in Brazil, and taught ELT for several years as well. He now is earning an MA in Education in London

Jeremy Harmer’s Blog: Jeremy is a writer and teacher/teacher-trainer for English to speakers of other languages, and he blogs about presentation.

Marisa Constantinides — TEFL Matters: This blogger runs CELT Athens, a teacher development center based in Greece.

Shaun Wilden’s Blog: Shaun has been involved in English language teaching for almost twenty years. He also maintains several online teaching sites including ihonlinetraining.net.

So this is English… This blog is filled with ideas, thoughts, discoveries, feedback and more about the teaching and learning of English.

Teaching Village: Barbara is an English teacher currently living in Kitakyushu, Japan, and using Web 2.0 tools and virtual worlds.

Course is five days or less, then 3 hours of preparation for each hour of training. Course is between five and ten days, then 2.5 hours of preparation for each hour of training. Course is over 10 days, then 2 hours of preparation for each hour of training.

research generally shows that there is at least a 50% reduction in seat time when a course is converted from classroom learning to elearning. Brandon Hall reports it is a 2:1 ratio.

Estimated Average Cost Per Hour Of Instruction - $1,901.00 to $2,170.00

If your organization is inexperienced, expect your average developmental man-hours to be closer to 450-500 man-hours per instructional hour.

1995 August/September issue of CBT Solutions Magazine reported that 221 hours was the average development time.

Category 1: Baseline Presentation

34:1 -- Instructor-Led Training (ILT), including design, lesson plans, handouts, PowerPoint slides, etc. (Chapman, 2007). 33:1 -- PowerPoint to E-Learning Conversion (Chapman, 2006a, p20). 220:1 -- Standard e-learning, which includes presentation, audio, some video, test questions, and 20% interactivity (Chapman, 2006a, p20) 345:1 -- 3rd party courseware. Time it takes for online learning publishers to design, create, test and package 3rd party courseware (Private study by Bryan Chapman 750:1 -- Simulations from scratch. Creating highly interactive content (Chapman, 2006b)

Category 2: Medium Simulation Presentation

Estimated Average Cost Per Hour Of Instruction - $3,768.00

Category 3: High Level Simulation Presentation.

Estimated Average Cost Per Hour Of Instruction - $7,183.00

Verizon says once they develop enough learning objects, they will be able to build courses in five hours or less ($10,000 to $15,000)

includes the instructional designer, project manager, and outsourcing fees (the instructional designer takes the content that is written in instructional design format to three other companies and an in house group for bids)

They use a content management system from OutStart

between 40 to 80 hours and costs $15,000 to $30,000 to develop one hour of elearning (George & Mcgee, 2003)

If the elearning looks more like a PowerPoint presentation, then a 1:1 is probably close, however, the more elearning moves away from looking like a Powerpoint presentation and looks more like an interactive package, then the more the ratio starts to increase.

Outside Consultant - $90.00 hour

Chapman

Category 1: Baseline Presentation

Change is always complicated. A the least it involves people, personalities, cultures, beliefs, values, emotions and identity.