Essential Information About Audio Teleconferencing For Educational PurposesMost of the people have associated audio teleconferencing with business purposes only. However the audio conference call service is being effectively utilized by the education sector as well. In this sector, audio teleconferencing is done using the traditional telephone lines and telephone instruments which are equipped with speakers and the lines are connected through a phone bridge. The teachers and audio teleconferencing facilitators make a number of advanced preparations for the purpose of education through audio teleconferencing. They prepare student packets in beforehand which contain notes and links as well as other pointers to information and these student packets are sent to student well before the conference so that they may come prepared for the audio teleconferencing session. These student packets act as a visual link between the teacher and his students at the time of audio teleconferencing. Since the teacher can not show the visual content while he is on an audio only teleconferencing system, these student packets provide the appropriate visual cues to the students. This also ensures that the student does not loose his concentration and start thinking about other matters during the conference calls. In some cases, the audio conference call service is accompanied by streaming of slide shows over the Internet. While this is a novel technology, it is still in the phase of adoption and people might not be open to use the new technology. Audio teleconferencing has a number of advantages which make it the best fit for the educational sector. The basic reason is the ease of use. Almost every person who is related to the educational sector, knows how to use a phone and audio teleconferencing is as simple as just making a telephone call. Similarly the telephone networks have penetrated even the remotest areas of the world and therefore, the conference call service can reach almost everywhere. Since almost all the phone systems work on same or similar system, there is no device incompatibility problem in the audio conferencing system. Almost all the present infrastructure can be used. Moreover arrangements of an audio teleconferencing session are much less expensive as compared to regular class system. Similarly the students and teachers who are geographically located at different locations need not travel to any common location. Rather using an audio teleconference, they can easily communicate as and when they find it fit. The same advantage also becomes a god sent gift when a guest educator has to interact with students. They can easily do it via audio teleconferencing without having to waste a lot of time traveling. Another emerging form of audio teleconferencing apart from the traditional conference calling,is the latest audio web video conferencing powered by the Internet. This system is very cheap and is being adopted the world over. |