Education: the Teleconference Style

 With all the different opportunities for education these days, technology has really come very far from where it was. From one-room school buildings to massive classrooms where multimedia presentations are available and each student has his or her own headphones so that he or she can focus in on more of what the professor is saying, education is definitely viewed as a commodity of great value in the United States. But has anyone ever thought of using a teleconference as a way to hold the classroom and lecture? There are actually many ideas on the subject and it probably won't be too far off into the future when all of our classrooms, especially at colleges and universities, will be conducted completely online in a teleconference fashion.

There are actually many benefits to conducting a classroom-style lecture and presentation over a piece of teleconference software on the internet. Of course, the first requirement would be that every student would have to have access to a high-speed internet connection, but with the popularity of Cable internet and DSL these days that really would be no problem. One of the benefits to having a teleconference-style lecture would be that everyone would be able to attend class and lecture no matter if they were extremely sick. This also means that everyone would be able to attend the lecture and teleconference classroom from the comfort of their own home.

For the professor's standpoint the benefit of holding a teleconference lecture and classroom would be that simultaneous lectures and presentations could potentially be going on at the same exact time. Of course this would be a bit harder but would take a bit of practice. All in all, the professor would have much easier access to all the students that he or she is teaching. On the other hand, from the student's standpoint of a teleconference lecture, getting to class would be much easier. Of course there would literally be no excuses for "skipping" a day of class, but then again there shouldn't be any truancy anyway.

With all the upsides to a teleconference style of educational learning it would seem as there are virtually no downsides. However, with everything good there is always something bad. The same holds true for teleconference learning. Consider, for example, that the professor's computer may possibly be down for a day or it has been hit with a virus. That obviously wouldn't be to good since they would need a computer to conduct the lecture. In addition, there could easily be cases of falsification on the student's side (i.e. being "present" at lecture when they really aren't there).

All in all, computers have brought a great revolution to the United States and the world and the internet certainly offers a world of knowledge and capabilities that have yet to be tapped into. This matter of the teleconference educational lecture is just one of those matters; however, chances are that it'll be readily available in the near future!