Project Background

The purpose of the COST€R project was to create a multilingual resource based decision-making application that enables producers and designers of educational multimedia as well as institutions and content providers to easily and quickly estimate and calculate the production costs of a multimedia application. These cost estimates allow them to make reasonable decisions in the selection and production of multimedia and eventually measure the effectiveness of their investment.

COST€R was a 24 months project (1 February 2002 - 31 January 2004) supported by the European Commission's Minerva Programme and responded to a clear need that was felt in the educational environment for a tool that allows teachers, institutions, schools and small companies, involved in creating educational multimedia production, to estimate cost and make cost comparisons. It offers a solution to a problem faced by many managers of educational resources as more and more non-professional or semi-professional individuals, organisations and institutions are putting effort and enthusiasm into producing educational multimedia materials.

The project finished at the end of January 2004 when the outcome consisted of a customisable downloadable database driven application, containing the budgeting data that was gathered by the COST€R team in Belgium, France and Spain. This tool has been made freely available to all educational customers and will be regularly updated until at least December 2005.

The partners were: ATiT, (Audiovisual Technology, Informatics and Telecommunications), the Catholic University of Leuven - Audiovisual Services , both based in Belgium, University of Nancy 2 - Vidéoscop in France and the Open University of Catalunya .

The COST€R project was supported by the European Commission's Minerva Programme