Yes, they do – and some accountants adopt a similar practice. At one time my business used a firm of accountants that appeared to be timing everything with a stopwatch, including every phone call that they made to me or that I made to them. The phone calls were itemised, along with everything else, in my annual bill. I finally sacked them, however, mainly because they became very lax in presenting my accounts to the local tax office, but what really annoyed me was that they itemised all the phone calls that I made to them asking why they hadn’t presented my accounts! Needless to say, I refused to pay for this.

Regarding the points that David makes, his institution seems to have tied things up quite nicely. There are many educational institutions, however, that simply perceive e-learning as a cheap option, failing to take proper account of tutors’ time and the new skills that they need to acquire. If e-learning is properly costed then it is not necessarily a cheap option and there is no economy of scale, i.e. it doesn’t get cheaper as the numbers of students increase – because a tutor can only deal with a certain number of students at one time. A maximum of 30 students per tutor has often been quoted as a desirable figure to aim at.

This is true of distance learning in general, and the students often feel isolated too. My wife Sally did an Open University degree in the 1970s-1980s. It took her 9 years to complete the 8 modules that she required. This was in the days of radio and TV broadcasts (no Web, no email), and lots of printed materials dropping through one's letterbox every month. We could not afford a VCR, so Sally had to get up at unearthly hours to watch the TV broadcasts. The system worked well because there was regular telephone contact with tutors, regular meetings with tutors and other students at local schools and colleges, regular assessment, a one-week summer school each year (where OU students could experience what it felt like to be at a "real" university) - but, above all, because the materials were well designed and aimed at students working on their own. These valuable lessons appear to have been forgotten by some of the institutions that are rushing headlong into what they call e-learning - as David says:

The same applies to online training. The NOF initiative in the UK was to a large extent a failure. The Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) produced a report on the NOF initiative in April 2002: ICT in schools: effect of government initiatives. The report makes important observations on the use of ICT in schools, including a number of successful case studies, but it is generally critical of the NOF training initiative:

"Training funded by the NOF has been effective in a quarter of secondary departments and a third of primary schools. In around six out of every ten secondary departments and half the primaries, the scheme has so far failed to build on teachers’ ICT skills or enable them to tackle pedagogical issues adequately. In a minority of schools, the scheme has acted as a catalyst for improvement." (p.22)

"Many teachers have found online support to be unsatisfactory. This was usually because access was unreliable or because mentors were dealing with too many teachers and their responses were therefore often infrequent, shallow or unhelpful. Successful online mentoring operated at ratios of under 30 teachers to each mentor." (p. 23)

"Some providers experienced major problems with their online systems to such an extent that teachers became frustrated by repeated failure to access their websites. Teachers who were left to their own devices to use distance learning materials on CD-ROM frequently made little headway and did not complete the training." (p. 24)

OFSTED (2002) ICT in schools: effect of government initiatives, Report, April 2002. See the OFSTED website, http://www.ofsted.gov.uk, where the report can be downloaded in PDF format: http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/publications/docs/19.pdf