Work from Any Where
Virtual Workplace    
with Eric Mack and Paul & Sarah Edwards
                                            
   

         Q:  My dream is to move my family to a mountain community in Maine. I understand technology is making it possible to work from anywhere. I’ve been a sales trainer. Could I earn a living teaching telecourses? What kind of equipment would I need and what might it cost? Ben         

Paul & Sarah:  Yes, you can earn a living teaching telecourses. You can teach, train, present and speak without leaving home and you don't even need a computer to do it -- although there are even more opportunities if you do. Called distance learning, e-learning and web-casting, offering coursework of all kinds remotely is a growing field. 

   One in every three U.S. colleges now offers some sort of accredited courses online and predictions are that demand for executive training alone will become a 7.1 billion market by 2002. 

     You may be surprised to learn that Maine is one of the best wired states in the country! Even the most remote communities have fiber optic access. So, it's possible for you to teach college or adult education courses or provide full-fee professional or corporate speaking or training engagements from a home office in the locale of your dreams. 

    If you don't mind doing some traveling, you could do an initial training program on your client's site and offer live remote follow-up seminars as an added value service. There are at least four different ways you can offer your sales seminars: 

1) The most cost effective is to do telephone seminars or teleconferences through a telephone bridge line. It requires no additional equipment other than your telephone. A bridge line can run as low as $26 plus longs distance charges. 

2) Next you can do teleconferences via phone with participants viewing visuals on a web site.

3) For a fee, companies like communicast.com offer web-casting services through which you can interact live with participants, take polls and provide Q&A's with your audience via the web. Sessions can be archived for sale or later use. 

4) Video conferencing from your home office is the most expensive option, but also most like a live presentation. It can be done using software like realmediaplayer and an ISDN telephone line. 

Eric Mack: You may be surprised at how easily you can equip yourself to offer video telecourses. First, you need to capture the video. This involves having a high-quality video camera which can costs from $600 to $1500 and video capture card which runs from $200 to $1000. 

   You also need an Internet connection from where you're presenting that will stream live to a hosting provider like communicast.com  Such services do archive, but if you wish to archive and edit your own presentations for re-sale you can outsource those services or purchase a video editing computer like Sony VIAO or Apple Mac. Amazingly, only a few years ago such a computer would have cost you $20,000, but you can get one now for around $4000.

   For more information realaudio.com has many tools for streaming and capturing video ranging from $35 to several thousand dollars. 

       For more information visit where you can find out more:

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