A time frame for course development

One of our early discussions revolves around an imaginary course instructor, Benoit, and how much time is needed to plan an online course.
I found this difficult to initially bend my brain around as I haven’t had any prior experiences designing an online course. Another complex factor to take into account was which LMS Benoit chose. My personal option was in favor of Moodle due to it’s seemingly more user friendly interface at the expense of creativity offered by Vista.
Compared to a number of other students, my estimate was on the low end, as I think I was a bit too optimistic about how long inputing data would take. Two key things I had also only sort of considered were time for testing and trouble shooting, and also the time consumed waiting to get course approval from the governing body.
In the end I found it a challenging, but useful task as I know in the future our school is looking to develop some online courses and the task will likely fall in my direction. At least now I will have something things to help frame a more realistic design timeframe.