If you already offer education there is no reason why you shouldn’t use webcasting to expand your market reach. With webcasting techniques you can spread your courses both in distance and in time, offering your education on a national or even international level.

Most schools already use internet extensively to publish course programs, instructions and applications. Take this a step further and you can even hold the course itself over internet. Use your solid teaching experience and become a powerful eLearning company!

Webcasted education also opens up new marketing and sales possibilities. You may decide to offer some classes On-Demand. This basically means that the classes are recorded and available for your customers to view upon their convenience. Other interesting properties is that you dont have the physical limits of a classroom. Your lectures may be broadcasted to an audience of arbitrary size.

A couple of steps to get started:

• Select one of two of your courses that could benefit from the webcasting ability.
• Make a simple business case that allows you to calculate capacity needs.
• Get webcasting equipment and start to work with webcasting as a project.
• Expand webcasting capacity into more courses in a speed that suits your needs.

You will need the following:

• Hardware: Camcorder, simple encoder, webserver or web hotel.
• Network: At least a DSL connection to transmit video and audio.
• Software: Easy to use webcasting software, Powerpoint, encoder software.
• Services: Most cost effective is to buy streaming media distribution as a service.
• Training: On hands practice works best. Appoint one person to handle the camcorder and encoder.

Internet has changed a lot in the way we work, but so far we have only seen the beginning of it. The good news is that you can adopt webcasting with quite a small effort. As we started to use the internet to convey our information we had to learn a lot about publishing, html, web page tools and organizing files. Webcasting, though, comes in a much nicer package. Software systems like Webocaster take care of the all technical stuff, and you can concentrate on your content.