Virtual Classrooms
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What's a Virtual Classroom?
Simply put, it's a classroom-like environment provided by special multimedia software that replaces the screen at the front of the traditional lecture room with a computer screen and represents a student via her live on-screen image and voice.The goal of this type of software is to emulate the best features of the physical classroom (such as drawing attention by raising one's virtual hand) while adding useful new features (such as video recordings of each day's session).
By this point in time, Virtual Classroom technology has evolved into a reliable and practical—not to mention highly economical—platform for providing high quality training services, which has been embraced by most corporations, institutes of higher education, and governments all over the world. In fact, some of the foremost vendors providing this technology are household names, such as Adobe and Cisco.
What's Wrong with Good Old-Fashioned Physical Classrooms?
Quite a bit, actually, during periods when finding effective new ways to control the high costs of employee training is foremost on every IT manager's mind!Such costs come in several forms, with the most obvious being the high financial costs of sending employees out of town for training. However, with the Virtual Classroom approach, it's not the students who travel; instead, it's their images and voices (aka "avatars") over the Internet! And that kind of travel is very cheap.
What's Right about the New Trend of Using Virtual Classrooms?
- If employees participate in the class using their office computers, any travel expenses above and beyond those they routinely incur just to go to work are eliminated;
- if students use a home computer to participate, travel expenses are reduced to zero.
Consultix has Experience with Virtual Classrooms
To obtain valuable experience with distance education technologies, Consultix CEO Dr. Tim Maher taught after-hours classes for Central Washington University from 1997 to 1998, evaluating software that is now part of the Elluminate Live! product. Since then, the amount of training that we have delivered via our Virtual Classroom environment has been growing continuosly.Although the Physical Classroom experience continues to be regarded as the Gold Standard for the corporate training industry, the Virtual Classroom experience is getting closer to matching its benefits all the time.
What's Different about Consultix's Virtual vs. Physical Classes?
Here at Consultix,- we teach the same topics in our Virtual classes as we do in our Physical ones,
- we use most of the same materials in our presentations and hands-on activities, and
- we award the same type of course-completion certificate for both class types.