Teleconferencing / Teletraining

Scope

This is a working document outlining some of the technical issues and problems that can be experienced in larger scale teleconferencing. This is a working document prepared for a friend, by someone who has produced and endured many teleconferences, some which were quite successful and some that could only be considered quite painful. If you personality type cannot tolerate misspellings, grammatical errors and the like, the you should stop reading now. This is a stream of consciousness document and reflects the consciousness of the author, not the desired format of all readers. Enough said.

Overview

Once a teleconference grows beyond about 5 locations with multiple people at each location, you start needed specialized equipment to make it work well. The main problem that you run into is noise. Not telephony noise, but people being noisy. Typical scenario, you have 5 locations and are doing teletraining at lunch time. Each remote location is using a speaker phone on a conference room table and everyone is eating lunch while learning. If the speaker phone is not muted, then every time Bob rattles his sandwich wrapper, everyone on the call gets to hear it. To make it worse, if the teacher is on a speaker phone, the volume level of Bob’s rapping, may cut out the teacher and only the wrapper will be heard.

For in-house training, you can usually order everyone to mute their phone and threaten to punish anyone who does not. If the remote locations are customers, then this is not possible. What can we do to avoid this problem.

Bridge

The first real step in teleconferencing is using a bridge. The bridge connects together all the locations and handles the balancing of all the telephone lines so that everyone had the same volume level, no matter how many locations are on the call. Bridges are generally sized by the number of locations or telephone calls that it can support at one time. It is possible to own a bridge, but for smaller companies, the cost of all the telephone lines out weights the cost savings over renting bridge space. For example a 20 locations conference requires 20 telephone lines at $10 or more a line. If you only have conferences every three months, then you have $200 a month in reoccurring expenses that are not being used.

Some of the main options for bridges are:

Purchase

Fairly obvious.

Rent time and space

You as the master location would be at your office.

Rent time and space and location

You as the master location would be at the bridge’s office. This would be to have better control of some of the bridges features or to take advantage of some of their production capabilities.

Features

Once you have a bridge, then there are a couple of features that are desired on the bridge. The name of the feature varies from bridge to bridge so you may have to ask the vendor to explain how their feature works.

Caller Muting:

You need to be able to mute and un-mute all of the remote stations in the conference. This takes care of the main problem listed above, room noise overlapping the main speaker. The muting process need to be switchable so that the call can be opened up to questions from the audience. The more desirable type allows individual locations to be muted and un-muted.

Location Monitoring:

This is a variation of the muting feature above, so that you can listen to a single remote location. When people start asking questions, you might want to pull a location off line and talk with them directly or to give them the "floor" and control the conversation.

Conference Locking

This prevents additional parties from joining the conference once it’s been started. If this is used, then a method of re-attaching dropped calls must be provided.

Master Location Equipment

Teacher Equipment

Now let’s take a look at what’s needed at the master location. Let’s assume that the bridge is outside of the master location. While it seems easiest for the master location to use a speaker phone, it is not the best solution. The problem is that the audio quality sucks! If you must use a speaker phone, then get a Polycom or equivalent. They are the best speaker phones made and will give you the least audio degradation.

A much better solution is to put the teacher on a head set. If there are multiple leaders, then the best solution is multiple headsets. If one person is running most of the call and another or couple of others have very small parts, then put the main speaker on a headset with a direct line to the bridge and the others on a speaker phone. Just make sure the speaker phone is muted when it is not being used.

Now that our main speaker is on a headset, make sure the headset is correctly adjusted. Make sure the microphone is correctly placed near the mouth for maximum audio quality. Not much different from regular speaking PA arrangements.

Other Needs at the Master Location

A Monitoring Station is desired at the master location. This is a separate line into the bridge, just like the remote locations. This is used to listen to the conference and make sure that the "produced" audio is what you really wanted. This is the same as having someone sit in the audience during a speech to perform the sound check. This should not be in the same room as the conference leader because there may be a slight delay in the audio and that may cause an auditory distraction for the speaker.

Communications to the Bridge is required for any technical issues during the call. This is a separate telephone line that can be used by the conference facilitators to call the bridge technical personnel or for the bridge to call the master location. Something always seems to come up and this contact path should be established ahead of time, so these conversations don’t have to be heard over the bridge.

Communications to the Remote Locations is required for what ever issues come up during the call. For example, "We can hear, We don’t’ have the right handouts" "Can you add in another line" and etc. These also work in the other directions if you desire to talk privately to one of the remote sites.

Seminar Leader Issues

One of the toughest issues for a trained speaker in a teleconference is the lack of visual feedback. In a large conference with 30 or 40 stations, you have a large audience, but they are muted so you can’t hear ongoing feedback and you can’t see them. This removes one of the best resources for any public speaker. If possible, have one or more people in the room with you to act as your audience. It makes it a lot easier than preaching to a blank wall. It’s also helpful to stop periodically and ask for feedback from the audience. Obviously you have to un-mute them so they can be heard. Basically you are looking for are they there and is your talk helping. Don’t ask me how many times I’m lectured for 5 or 10 minutes to a dead line because I didn’t get feedback or have a monitoring station listening to the produced audio, argh!

Second issue for the speaker is to remember that they are one an auditory medium. The world greatest visually oriented speaker will fall flat on a teleconference if they don’t modify their style. Think of a mime on radio! Hand outs can help and in a moment we’ll speak of more interactive visuals to go along with your speech.

Beyond the Basics

Prerecorded Audio

Teleconferences are mainly spoken voices, but music and other pre-recorded sounds can be introduced. There are a couple of companies that make interfaces that will add line level audio onto a telephone line. From here, you can add music introductions, play recorded sound bites, sound effect, etc. A couple of things to watch for. First the telephone lines and bridge will restrict the audio frequencies and dynamics. Best case frequency response is 300Hz to 3,000Hz. Everything else will be blocked. The dynamic range is very limited. Probably around 40 or 50dB. If exact specs are need, they can be located. Also remember that this is the best case, the telephone lines, bridge and remote location telephones may also degrade the audio quality.

Visual Aids

Microsoft’s PowerPoint is Internet enabled. Your slides can be hung on the net for the attendees to download before hand and have available in hard copy during the class. The next step could be to have them all on the net and have the remote locations view them on-line and use links on the pages to move forward and back between the pages. The third choice is to use "push" technology and display them on the remote locations PC as you get to them in your speech. This helps keep the focus on the current slide, rather than wandering ahead or behind. In addition, there are some real time mark up capabilities so that you can make notes or drawings on the slides while you speak about them. Much like you would use a laser pointer during a traditional presentation.

The only limitations that you may have is the throughput capacity of your web server and the speed of the connection at the remote location. If the speed if available, then you could even have animation and video clips. Obviously prolonged full speed video is probably beyond the capacity of most of the remote offices.

Making a Permanent Record

Most bridges have the capability to record the conference. This is always recommended. In addition, if your voice mail system has the capacity, you can make the conference available to callers. For example, maybe the conference hit on a popular topic that a lot of doctors need to hear repeated. Clip that section out of the master tape and load it into a mailbox. Us the IVR to point people to that mailbox and you can repeat yourself as many times as they need and you don’t have to waste any breath. Maybe over time, build up a library of topics and let doctors pick and chose what they would like a refresher one. Telephone audio takes up very limited band width so not much storage is needed. You could very easily have a couple of hours of lessons on-line and available for future reference.

Well this is about all I have at the moment. This was all composed while racking the leaves, so if I think of anything else, I’ll make sure to add it. Please give me a call with any questions or if you want to brainstorm any ides. I’ll be glad to help you out in anyway that you need. All of this is cool technology to me, being an old telephone and marketing guy.