Dear GKD Members, I am an entrepreneur engaged in providing business management training in a relatively new country, Macedonia (formerly part of Yugoslavia). I am pleased to participate in this discussion since one of the avenues I have been exploring involves utilizing videoconferencing to facilitate professional development of business executives.
The Moderator has asked: > 2. What resources do we need to provide effective ICT-enhanced > professional training? What technologies? Tools? Human resources? > Infrastructure? Incentives, etc.? What level of financial investment > should we be making? It seems to me that in order for a developing country like Macedonia to become competitive in the Global Market we must develop better training tools to educate owners of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and middle and upper level managers of medium and large (at least for Macedonia) businesses. One of the best tools can be online seminars delivered by experts who are outstanding in their respective fields. To this end, I recently held a training course on the subject of International Finance delivered by a Professor from Thunderbird University in the US. This course was very well received by the participants, based on a questionanaire that was admiministered following the seminar. All the participants felt that the videoconference was 'useful' or 'very useful' for their jobs. Several commented that the innovative medium (at least in this part of the world) of videoconferencing enabled a "new kind of learning" to take place--the real time impact of having their questions answered as soon as they are raised during the seminar was deeply felt. I realize that for many on this List videoconferencing is nothing special, but for us, in Macedonia, it could have a profound impact. Most of the participants were keenly interested in attending the rest of the series of tele-lectures (4 more are planned over the next year). This level of management training is impossible to get in our country. Bringing guest lecturers to Macedonia to deliver courses would be prohibitively expensive for us, with such small budgets. Online training tools such as videoconferencing give us all the advantages of face-to-face training with virtually none of the disadvantages involved in actually holding an actual classroom session. I say 'virtually' because there were some problems involved in finding and later establishing a connection between Skopje and Thunderbird University in Arizona. The problem was that Thunderbird uses only ISDN protocol to transmit their videoconferences; ISDN lines are very rare in Macedonia and extremely expensive to use (around $5.00 per minute). In addition, even though we twice attempted to establish a test connection using ISDN, we were unsuccessful. I guess the protocol is not as 'standardized' as we had thought. We eventually found a way around this problem by using a bridging service to convert the ISDN signal to IP protocol. IP connections are much more common in Macedonia. In addtion, we were able to have a much higher quality signal trasmitted to us due to the increased bandwidth we could achieve over IP (384 Kbps) versus only 256 Kbps over ISDN. Although the bridging service enabled us to hold this seminar at a reasonable cost, it was still a bit expensive for us (about USD $300 for an hour session). Do List members know of some alternatives that might be a less expensive way to convert the ISDN format to IP? All of which brings me to the question above, namely why don't developing countries like ours have in place a policy that would encourage the development of infrastructure to permit more effective use of training tools like videoconferencing. For example, I understand that Macedonia has miles of fiber optic cable layed but it is not being used by MacTel, the telco monopoly. We have recently been offered a wireless connection by one of the ISP's here, but I wonder whether this would truly be cost effective for course content delivery in real-time. Perhaps some of the more 'technical' List members may have a better idea of the cost advantages inherent in using wireless versus a standard IP connection over a cable or leased line (expensive) or more commonly, over a dial-up connection (using MacTel's phone lines, so also relatively expensive). The monopoly is due to end in January 2005, so the price of connectivity should fall greatly once ISP's begin to proliferate and compete with one another for business. Hopefully the quality of the connections will improve as well, once that happens. Once again, I am very pleased to be able to join this discussion and look forward to your helpful replies. Beti ------------------------------------ Business Education Center Elizabeta Ristovska - Petrovska [EMAIL PROTECTED] Makedonija 29 tel: +389 2 3215447 tel2:+389 2 3218260 fax: +389 2 3218268 ------------------------------------ ------------ This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by the dot-ORG USAID Cooperative Agreement, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org provides more information. To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd For the GKD database, with past messages: http://www.GKDknowledge.org
