Audio Teleconferencing

Nationwide, there are about 15 to 20 audio teleconferencing bridging services in an industry estimated at $ 300 million to $ 500 million a year. It pays to shop around for bridging services. Different services use different bridges. Most services are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Their operators can monitor the quality of a call or, if security is an issue, they will stand by in case assistance is needed. A good conference service should put 20 sites on a call immediately. At maximum, allow one minute per site to create an audio teleconference.

Current applications include sales meetings, ad hoc crisis management sessions, press conferences, educational courses and seminars, business meetings and training sessions. Audio teleconferencing is widely used by banks, law firms, international corporations, government agencies and associations. Peoria-based Caterpillar Inc. has been using audio teleconferencing for marketing and technical teletraining, and has its own equipment.

Craig Gardner of Caterpillar's marketing training division explains that field reps call in home-office experts to meet with their customers. "Our guys can call us up and say, 'We want to talk about backhoe loaders,' and we schedule a session."

Caterpillar's Hot Topics program, Mr. Gardner says, "has proved the cheapest and most efficient way to respond immediately to competitive situations in the field. A dealer or salesperson needs a quick response to an issue, and we bring in 20 to 25 people to share their expertise."

As a result of Caterpillar's first successful international sessions -- linking Peoria with Sagami, Japan; Melbourne, Australia, and Macao -- in which about 50 Caterpillar staff members participated, the company is planning international training courses, with participants from Switzerland and Spain.

"High quality course content which supports the instruction of the independent, distant learner is a key element in creating a successful distance learning program," said Patricia Henry Leonard, senior vice president of Simon & Schuster's Higher Education Division and general manager of its Distance Learning Group. "An online education must be the combination of the best of both technology and content".

The tremendous demand for online learning is creating a dynamic market that is transforming the higher education field. This audio teleconference will examine the factors that have driven online learning to become an important part of today's national education agenda.

These factors include: the rapid growth of the Internet and technologies such as e-mail, streaming audio and video, and threaded discussion; the growth of college enrollment and expansion of the adult learner market; the correlation of higher education with higher salaries; and especially increasing demand for online courses to meet the needs of so-called non-traditional learners whose schedules can't accommodate the commute to a traditional campus. By the year 2008, 97 percent of all educational institutions will rely on online learning in some form to meet the needs of their students.