This book is designed to give planners of open and distance learning programs the technical information needed to determine the cost of programs and analyze the behavior of costs. The following are among the topics discussed: budgets; classification of resources (human resources, premises and accommodation, and equipment and furniture); a basic framework for analyzing revenue costs (cost; direct costs, indirect costs, and overheads; fixed, variable, and semivariable costs; cost drivers; variable costs, linearity, and economies of scale; and committed and managed costs); volume and its relationship with fixed and variable costs; treatment of capital costs (depreciation, social discount rate, annualization factor, and investment in course materials); overheads (direct and indirect costs and their relationship to products and services, traditional management accounting, activity-based costing, and identification of cost objects); attribution of costs to joint products; the activity of costing; course design (production rates and reduction of labor costs); media; student support; cost-efficiency (technical issues in drawing comparisons, development of a common methodology for economic studies of distance education, and cost-efficiency of mixed-mode systems); cost-effectiveness (measurement and evidence of cost-effectiveness); cost-benefit analysis (private and social rates of return from distance and open learning); and costs, prices, demand, and funding (prices, demand, and what students can afford). The bibliography contains 188 references. (MN)