Don't Set Your Videoconference up for Disaster:

As our videoconferencing capabilities have grown, so have the problems involved with planning meetings and trainings and implementing them effectively to the satisfaction of all participating parties. 

The most effective use of this technology is to present to small groups located at a few far-end sites. For example, many higher education institutions never videoconference to more than three far-end locations at a time, for a total of four participating sites. In our case, this approach, by nature, means doing repeated trainings in order to accommodate all available County Health Department staff.

On the other hand, Community Health Services has pointed out to us that in the past, there have been too many trainings scheduled and they have implemented guidelines stating that staff trainings using videoconferencing should only be offered on the second and fourth Fridays of every month. This policy, albeit necessary, severely limits the best use of the technology and lessens the chance of offering intimate interactive trainings to small groups at few sites. The larger class size (greater number of far-end sites) can become unwieldy and one-on-one instruction is lost or at the very least is greatly lessened.

It has been our experience that the more sites that attempt to participate in a given videoconference the greater the potential for problems and the more unmanageable the conference gets for the Event Coordinators, Facilitators, and Presenters.

Using these guidelines, attempting to facilitate an effective interactive videoconference of great size with all or most of the available sites online for a videoconference at the same time, is a daunting if not unattainable task. 

As a rule of thumb we have set “35 connections” as the maximum number of sites for a manageable videoconference. That is a much larger number than any videoconferencing group that we are aware of, allows to connect at once. In some cases this means that you will have to offer two sessions instead of one to accommodate all interested participants. 

That is not to say that in an actual emergency situation we won’t allow larger videoconferences, but generally speaking “35 sites” per conference is our maximum.

During those times when you feel you must reach as many sites as possible for a single videoconference, you should try not to include question and answer sessions. Instead, you should think of it as a one-way television broadcast and ask that questions be phoned or e-mailed to you after the videoconference concludes.

This information is posted to benefit you in making the right choices when preparing to schedule a multi-site videoconference. Don’t set your videoconference up for disaster. As we’ve described, bigger is not necessarily better. In fact, when we experience technical difficulties during a videoconference, the more connected sites we have online the less chance we have of quickly and effectively discovering the problem and correcting it. Instead of scheduling a videoconference with sixty connected sites, you might consider doing two with thirty connections, or three with only twenty sites online at a time.

Revised on 11-01-07