March/April 2007 | Home

STC Region 8 News

by Beau Cain
STC Region 8 Director

The Region 8 Director's web page is located at www.stcregion.org/region8/r8_ds.htm.

The most pervasive complaint I've dealt with during my term in office has been about the relative unavailablity of STC's webinars. They are great education, certainly, but WebEx and STC couldn't negotiate a satisfactory arrangement for these presentations to be recorded for rebroadcast at times that would be convenient for non-U.S. members and colleagues.

The new STC Director of Education, Lloyd Tucker, has made the first major step toward providing this great educational benefit conveniently to everyone! Following are excerpts from his announcement to the STC Board.

We are currently making several changes in our web seminar program.

First, we are changing the name from "Web Telephone Seminars" to "Live Web Seminars." We will continue to offer the seminars in a synchronous mode or live. But we will also soon be able to offer the same seminar in an asynchronous mode or not live, but archived. Those who cannot attend in real time would then have access to the seminar 24/7.

International members will not have to use the telephone but can use VOIP and save on telephone surcharge fees.

We are also changing our service provider. Our contract with WebEx expired on Dec 20. We have begun service with Genesys. There will be no drop in service as Genesys has picked up our Jan. 17 seminar. There are many very good things about Genesys (I have worked with them before) including:

• They offer the same capability as WebEx (PowerPoint, desktop applications, live web).
• They do not require a contract.
• They bill only for minutes used. There are no overage fees, and we can accommodate up to 500 attendees.
• We can do small meetings, too.
• Anyone we authorize can host a meeting and one bill (separated by event) will come to STC.

Genesys gives us several options. We can run seminars ourselves for a total cost of .05 per minute per hookup (phone and web included) or we can have a full service conference with Genesys operators on the line and with an enunciator for $425 plus .18 per minute per hookup.

Genesys offers us a large and small conference capability. At .05 per minute we could use it for board calls and all sorts of other small meetings. For example, I know an association that uses Genesys for new member orientation sessions. Our imagination is our only limitation.

By saving some money on overhead, we can hopefully work on a more robust elearning program that could include short online courses with live web seminars, wikis, podcasts and a whole blended learning approach. There are also many other possibilities that we can explore with chapters, SIGs, committees, and so forth.