Training Costs Less When You Use Web-based Conferencing Software

Many business owners think of training as a liability—something that drains money from the bottom line rather than enhancing it. But you can actually increase revenue with the right web-based training. The quicker your customers use your product or service, the sooner they are putting money into your pocket.

Cisco WebEx^TM Training Center, provided by InterCall, even gives you the means to schedule fee-based live sessions and recorded sessions for those users who want a bit more than their contract provides. The eCommerce function lets attendees pay via credit card or coupon code that you provide. This lets you generate revenue from training or offer additional training as a value-added service with coupon codes.

Web-based Training Saves on Travel Costs
You've already saved (or earned) money from your web-based training and we haven't even begun discussing the money you'll save on travel. Every time one of your staff leaves home base to train a new customer, you're spending money and losing productivity. These are just a few of the costs associated with on-site training:

• Travel (flight, rental car, hotel room and meals)
• Room rental for large group training
• A/V equipment rental and possibly staff to run it
• Productivity lost with employees out of office

You can figure your own travel savings by using our calculator.

Web-based Training Is Convenient for Customers, Too
Training takes up time for your customers, too. Web based training gives them the flexibility to schedule sessions when it's more convenient for them—from the comfort of their home or office. With WebEx Training Center On-Demand, customers have even more flexibility to play back pre-recorded materials at their convenience.

Training doesn't have to be a drain on your resources when you use web-based conferencing software.

Dan Uhlmeyer is a Sr. Product Manager and the "Web Conferencing" blogger.  He has nearly ten years of product experience in Web Conferencing and has managed several services at InterCall. When not punching on the keyboard, you can find Dan enjoying time with his wife and two children or running a marathon.

Employ Three Styles of Teaching with a Web-based Conference

Everyone absorbs concepts in different ways. Everyone uses three senses (hearing, sight and touch) to learn, but people tend to lean predominantly toward one sense. Some people learn visually, others primarily through words and some people need hands-on interaction before they can grasp a concept.

Audio-based conference calls limit your means of communication to one method only. People who aren't auditory learners are out of luck.

Statistics say only 20-30% of children are auditory learners, and this statistic doesn't change much as those kids become adults in the business world. How do you reach the other 70-80% of the population? A web-based conference lets you employ all three senses to make a point, share information or close a sale.

Auditory Learning in a Web-based Conference
The audio component remains an important part of any web-based conference. Whether you dial in through your telephone or listen through your computer speakers, InterCall's web-based conference services promise clear service to make the most of oral presentations.

Visual Learning in a Web-based Conference
Integrate PowerPoint^® slides, videos and web browsing to show your audience what you want to show them. When you can't find the picture you need, draw it out on a virtual whiteboard. When participants don't understand what you're telling them, you have other tools to make your point.

Kinesthetic Learning in a Web-based Conference
This is perhaps the most challenging learning style to integrate into any environment. But by sharing your desktop or web browser with conference participants, you can give them the hands-on interaction they crave. Consider letting participants brainstorm ideas on the whiteboard, turning over control of your web browser or letting training session participants actually perform functions on the program they're learning. Don't underestimate the value of polls and surveys to keep kinesthetic learners involved.

What type of learner are you? Do you keep all three styles of learning in mind during your presentations?

Nicole Scheel is the Director of Training, and the “Tips & Training Blogger”. Nicole has been in training with InterCall for nine years and currently manages our internal and customer training departments, also known as InterCall University. When she's not training someone, you can find Nicole volunteering in her community or finishing her Masters in Training & Development at Roosevelt University.

Save Time and Money by Training Your Employees and Reaching Out to Prospects from a Virtual Classroom

Lots of opportunities exist for small to medium size businesses to use classroom video conferencing technology to train employees, reach out to prospects, and even generate solid sales leads. But which ones to choose? Let's peek inside a virtual classroom and have a look at the different types of learning environments available.

Virtual Classroom

A virtual classroom uses video conferencing technology to place the teacher at the front of a “room,”—that is, in front of his webcam. The seminar is then transmitted to students in various locations. The students may be gathered together in another room, or may all be studying from the comfort of their homes or office desks. Alternately, the teacher may be instructing students at a near site, while other students on the far site learn simultaneously.

Web-based Video Conferencing

Typically more interactive than a virtual classroom, web-based video conferencing takes advantage of services from companies like InterCall to create easy-to-use, relatively inexpensive (compared to thousands of dollars in video conferencing hardware and software) audio and video conferences over the Internet.

Mobile-based Learning

With services from InterCall, students and trainees can take audio and video conferencing with them on the road, for the pinnacle of mobile-based learning. A web conference sent straight to a prospect's smartphone, recorded and archived to be viewed at his convenience, is a great way to reach out to potential clients.

E-Learning

E-learning could accurately be described as comprising any and all the above technology. Typically, however, it involves the distribution of course materials, including eBooks, and then focuses on education in a digital environment, through chat programs, forums, and web-based testing. E-learning can be used to market a company's products or services, or can, in fact, be sold as a service.

Whatever your virtual classroom video conferencing needs, the specialists at InterCall can set you up with the program that is right for you.

  

Nicole Scheel is the Director of Training, and the “Tips & Training Blogger”. Nicole has been in training with InterCall for eleven years and currently manages our internal and customer training departments, also known as InterCall University. Nicole has her Masters in Training & Development from Roosevelt University. When she's not training someone, you can find Nicole volunteering in her community.

Free Webinar - From Traditional to Virtual: Designing, Delivering and Supporting Virtual Learning

With training and travel budgets shrinking, organizations are struggling with the issue of how to continue to provide effective development opportunities. Using a virtual classroom, if done well, can be a powerful and effective development tool. But there are challenges along the path from the traditional to the virtual classroom.

Attend our FREE webinar to ensure your Virtual Learning has the right design, the right delivery and the right learning transfer strategy. Explore how to create a high-impact and successful virtual learning experience. Specifically, you’ll have a chance to explore some of the most common questions clients have about virtual learning:

• How is virtual learning different from Virtual Presenting, anyway? Is it more than a talking head or a PowerPoint webcast?
• How do you keep people actively engaged during the session rather than multitasking?
• How do you deal with varying degrees of technology proficiency?
• What do facilitators need to do differently when facilitating a virtual program?

For answers to these questions and more, join us Thursday, April 22, 2010
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM Eastern
Register Now »

Maribeth Brown is an Associate Marketing Manager for InterCall. She has been with InterCall for 8 years. She lives in Auburn, Alabama with her two daughters.

New Tax Credit Helps Pay for New Employees, But Distance Learning Tools Cut Training Costs

The tax credit of $5000 announced by President Obama for each “net” new hire in 2010 promises to help SMBs expand with new employees. (The term “net employees” refers to additions to an SMB staff, not employees hired to replace employees that left the company).

While the tax credit helps offset costs of new employees and makes hiring that much more desirable, it doesn't pay for employee training software or other training tools for new employees. And because it only counts toward “net” employees, it doesn't help if your firm has a high turnover rate. As an SMB owner, how can you stay connected to your new hires, increase employee retention and train new and existing employees on rapidly advancing technologies?

The answers lie in distance learning tools and employee training software—and InterCall can help.

InterCall is best known as a full-service audio, video and web conference service provider. Our distance learning tools are also second-to-none. Whether you're training employees who work remotely, or bringing your staff together at their individual desks to learn about your company policies, InterCall's interactive solutions are easy to use, so employees can focus on the content, not the technology.

Some features of our distance learning tools, such as the Cisco WebEx Training Center provided by InterCall, include the ability to:

• Easily scale training programs to reach more people, more frequently
• Quiz and test trainees to ensure retention and track productivity
• Reduce costs on travel and facilities rental
• Organize “breakout sessions,” permitting trainees to bond and learn together, fostering a spirit of cooperation for improved employee retention

Knowing how you'll train your new hires rapidly and at a lower-than-expected cost makes that tax credit look even more enticing, doesn't it?

Cambria Vaccaro is the Senior Director, Marketing Communications and our “Industry News” blogger.  Cambria has been in the conferencing industry for nearly fifteen years, and has seen it evolve from a traditional video bridging service to include cool web features and remote communication services.  She is an avid runner, cook, wife and mother of two gorgeous girls.

Harness the Power of Leader Connections

Please welcome recent webinar speaker and guest blogger, Jerry Cahn.

Do you want the most out of your professional life? Advance your corporate career? Start a new company for which you have to raise money, find talented employees, engage reliable, trustworthy vendors and acquire the right customers? The traditional recommendation is hard work and networking. A more effective approach for the 21st century:  connecting and branding.

Networking generally allows you to increase the number of people who can provide peer-level introductions. However, these are NOT the decision makers who can open doors to leaders who can create the opportunities you need to capitalize on in order to achieve your goals. 

Know what you want and who can create the opportunities. If you don’t know the leaders personally, then figure out who does and get introduced. If that’s not easy, discover where you can meet the leaders (e.g., conferences), and use the proper approach to introduce yourself. Don’t be intimidated; be confident and trust yourself by clarifying your brand value and learning how to present it effectively. Leaders want to meet other leaders because they know that the best way to share, inspire and give-back (the hallmark of leaders) is to collaborate with others.

There is a science and art to Leader Connections. It’s worth mastering the mind-set and skill-sets because that’s the way to get ahead.  To see it in action, review a few our case studies. If you need help implementing it yourself, we offer our Connect-to-the-Top workshops and coaching programs. Know your brand and communicate it succinctly. Develop the right strategy to approach and follow-through with targeted leaders. As you connect with those leaders, the opportunities you seek will appear.

Jerry Cahn, Ph.D., J.D., is a presentation master, organizational strategist and executive coach. He helps clients design and implement effective business strategies, sharpen sales and marketing performance, develop leadership skills and performance cultures, and produce winning sales, marketing and investor presentations.

8 PowerPoint Tips for the Online Classroom

Creating a presentation that is engaging, interesting and informative is often difficult, even for the most seasoned professionals! While presenting in a conference room or training facility, it’s easy to make sure people comprehend what you’re presenting.  However, it’s not always easy to do that in a web conference or online classroom. Every time I write a blog, I send the topic out to my team and ask them for tips, tricks and suggestions for the topic.  This month, Chris McLean, a product trainer who is getting his masters in organizational leadership with a focus on training, was quick to respond with the below tips.  I couldn’t have said it better myself, so for this blog you can credit the learning to him!

8 PowerPoint Tips for the Online Classrom

View more presentations from Intercall .

Keep these tips in mind the next time you create a presentation. Some of them may be challenging (I know I personally have a hard time with the 6 x 6 tip when I create content), but I guarantee in the long run it will make for more effective and engaging online training. What are some of your tips for content creation?  Let us know below!

  

Nicole Scheel is the Director of Training, and the “Tips & Training Blogger”. Nicole has been in training with InterCall for nine years and currently manages our internal and customer training departments, also known as InterCall University. When she's not training someone, you can find Nicole volunteering in her community or finishing her Masters in Training & Development at Roosevelt University.

6 Ways to Make Online Learning Interactive

In my last post, we talked about how to help students retain information when they are in a virtual classroom. Today, I wanted to go over a few ways to make online learning more interactive. When you get in your groove, it is very easy to forget you’ve got people on the line and that you aren’t just talking to yourself. If you keep the class is interactive and engage your students, they have a better chance at processing and retaining the information.

 

Tips for Increasing Interaction

1. Virtual Whiteboards
   Allow students to use the whiteboard function through you web conferencing provider. They can brainstorm together during a meeting. Writing down ideas will keep them focused and allows them to work with you during the meeting.

2. Polling Feature
   Use the polling feature to ask multiple choice questions during your session. You can test students on the information that you just taught and get instant feedback on whether or not they are actually “getting it”.

3. Application Sharing
   Some web conferencing products allow you to pass control of your application to a student. Call on individuals and give them control of your document via application sharing so that they are in control and can try it on their own. It lets students show you what they have learned and keeps everyone on their toes.
    

4. Web Tour
   This is a great way to allow attendees to surf the web and research topics that you may have just discussed. During a web tour you can “drop” participants on a certain web site and let them click around. When the tour is over, all participants are returned to the meeting.

5. Feedback Indicators
   Colored boxes or emoticons that allow participants to show feedback will let you know if someone has a question of if you should speed up or slow down, etc.

6. Talk
   Remember to talk to your virtual students. I realize this may seem like a strange one, however I’ve caught myself many times just going through the motions of presenting in an online class. All of the sudden, I realize I haven’t stopped for questions, asked for feedback or checked for retention. If you are using a slide presentation, put in markers in the notes area to remind yourself it’s time to stop and relate to your audience.

The practices that we would use in a traditional classroom are the same practices that we should use online: be engaging, check for questions, take breaks, engage students every five minutes, test for knowledge, role play, etc. With today’s technology, all of these are possible even when using a virtual classroom.

  

Nicole Scheel is the Director of Training, and the “Tips & Training Blogger”. Nicole has been in training with InterCall for nine years and currently manages our internal and customer training departments, also known as InterCall University. When she's not training someone, you can find Nicole volunteering in her community or finishing her Masters in Training & Development at Roosevelt University.

6 Ways to Retain Information Learned Online

One of the most important things for a trainer to do is make sure their students retain the information taught to them. There are many statistics floating around on training-related web sites that talk about the “formula” in which adults learn and how much information they can take in. Unfortunately, there are just as many rebuttals to those statistics. I really don’t think there is a magic formula to make someone more successful in online learning—we need to remember that each person is different. 

As I’ve mentioned before, my team does the majority of their trainings online. So I went to the experts and asked them for tips on how to help students retain information taught in an online class.

 

Tips for Retaining Information:

1. Annotation tools
   Use the highlighter or pointer provided by your web conferencing software. This makes information stand out and much easier to remember. Plus, it helps students follow along.

2. Full screen mode
   Some web conference providers allow you to force attendees to view your content in full screen. This keeps participants engaged in the presentation and they are less likely to multi-task because what you are showing them takes up their entire monitor.

3. File transfer
   Use this web conferencing feature to allow students to download materials before, during or after an online training. It makes information readily available to the students, on their computers, when they need it. And there are no excuses—they can do it then and there.

4. Take breaks
   In a normal classroom setting, students need to decompress and absorb what they just learned. The same applies to online learning. Make sure you take plenty of breaks throughout the session.

5. End each session with take-aways
   Ask each participant to give you at least one thing that they learned from the session. In most of our classes, we end with an action plan. We ask students to jot down what they are going to start, stop and continue doing as a result of the class.

6. Use the notes tools
   Many web conferencing tools now have an area for students to take notes in.  It reinforces what they’ve just heard and helps them to remember the information.

If you have tips that you’d like to share with us, please do so in the comments below. If you are sitting through online training sessions and wish there was something your instructors would do to make learning easier, please share that as well. Next week, I’ll give some tips on how to make online classes more interactive.

  

Nicole Scheel is the Director of Training, and the “Tips & Training Blogger”. Nicole has been in training with InterCall for nine years and currently manages our internal and customer training departments, also known as InterCall University. When she's not training someone, you can find Nicole volunteering in her community or finishing her Masters in Training & Development at Roosevelt University.

Training on a Budget

  

It seems that no matter who you talk to these days, the conversation turns to the poor economy. Budgets are being cut, travel is being reduced, people are getting laid off and yet the need for training and education never diminishes. As training professionals, we’re asked to keep the same volume of classes and produce high quality training, but with fewer resources. For some, this can prove to be a challenge, while others get creative in their pursuit of keeping up with the same standards.

Those same standards typically include on-site training, which can be very expensive. Let’s look at the numbers: For a one week on-site training class, typical expenses you can expect to incur, per student, include:

$700 hotel + $400 airfare + $300 food + 100 transportation = $1500 cost for 1 business trip

After $1500, you’ve got the person geared up with what you need them to know. Now, factor in your costs for supplies, room, projector rental and group activities such as dinners and drinks, etc. For a ten person, one week, on-site class you’re looking at almost $20,000. Depending on the frequency of the class, and the location, your budget dollars start to rapidly dwindle.  Keep in mind that you’ll also need to account for the time lost to travel, which most likely amounts to a full day.

Let’s take that same example and, instead of being at an on-site meeting, plug in using audio and web conferencing. Depending on your usage and the platform you prefer for your conference call and web meeting, they rate you pay for the combined services will differ. In this case, let’s use something on the higher end and say that combined you’d be spending $0.60 per minute per participant. With a few breaks and lunch, you’re probably figuring that you would be online for six hours per day.

 

360 minutes x 4 days = 1440 minutes of conferencing per participant
10 students x 1440 minutes of conferencing = 14,400 weekly conferencing minutes
14,400 x $0.60 = $8640 total cost of online training

That’s an overall savings of $11,360 per class! Offer that class once each  month and you save $136,320 on your yearly budget! That doesn’t even include those “extra costs” that we tend to forget about—binders, printing costs, pens, flip charts, etc.—that aren’t needed with online classes. ALL of these extras are already built into our web conferencing platforms.

As I’ve mentioned in previous blog postings, 95% of the training we do here at InterCall is online. That word online can mean different things to different people. In this case, I mean that we have a “live” class that is facilitated by an instructor using real-time audio and web conferencing.

Now I realize that I work for a conferencing company, so I’m a bit biased as to the ease of use and the ability to transform classroom led training into virtual training; however, I would encourage any of you to try it out, even if it is just for one call. To show you just how easy it is, I invite you to register for one of our FREE (another budget friendly option) training sessions.

If you have any of your own budget-friendly training tips, I’d love to hear them, so please comment below. Also if there are any questions or comments please leave them and I’ll make sure to follow up. Thanks for reading!

  

Nicole Scheel is the Director of Training, and the “Tips & Training Blogger”. Nicole has been in training with InterCall for nine years and currently manages our internal and customer training departments, also known as InterCall University. When she's not training someone, you can find Nicole volunteering in her community or finishing her Masters in Training & Development at Roosevelt University.