Determination and evaluation of the parameters influencing the virtual educational costs

E-learning has recently attracted many people specially those who cannot attend traditional educational programs for different reasons such as busy schedule, long distance, etc. There is also a growing interest among many public universities to develop such programs in addition to their regular business activities. The primary question is to know how much a program cost and what is the most important factors affecting the cost of e-learning. In this paper, we present an empirical study the measure the effects of different items on the cost of e-learning programs. The proposed study of this paper gathers the necessary cost components of three governmental universities located in city of Tehran/Iran. We choose ten different cost items for our analysis and using some statistical test determine the most important ones. The preliminary study of this paper indicates that seven cost items play essential role on determining the cost of e-learning, which includes utilities, internet connection and network, employee payment, software & licensing, payments of instructors and their assistants, hardware equipments and other overhead expenditures. This could help us determine the precise cost of e-learning using activity cost method.