About 1 year ago, Intertech began offering "blended classes".  This training mode allows us to hold a class which is attended by folks in our physical classroom (in lovely Eagan, MN) as well as people from around the US.  Those who are attending remotely typically use a land-line phone system (or in some cases, VOIP) to hear the lecture, and webex to view the slides, demos and quizzes.

At first, I was fearful that this mix of student types could hurt both groups of people. My first fear was that the remote attendees could become isolated. However, since Intertech has training rooms equipped with SmartBoards (you know, the cool white boards you can control with your hand, write on with "virtual pens" and so on), the remote folks have much more engaging eye candy- far more than a bunch of random PowerPoint slides. The use of the SmartBoard seems to keep the remote folks more connected than I realized. The local folks also seem to have a fair share of "oohs" and "aahs".

I was also fearful that local and remote students might have problems hearing each other.  Thankfully, our training rooms are equipped with built in speakers / mics, so again, things are fairly smooth.

To be honest, teaching a blended class feels little different than teaching a class where all students are local to the classroom.  These days, I tend to feel like something is "missing" if we don't have at least 1 remote student.  The mixing of student types tends to make everyone a bit more interactive, which is fantastic.

Not everything is flawless however. We have had a few times where we lost connections to remote students due to oddball issues in the area.  Once, some city workers basically took down our internet connectivity more much of a work day.  Obviously this was no good for anyone.  Beyond such issues, the core infrastructure (webex, mics, land-lines, etc) has been quite solid.

So, as an FYI, if you are interested in a standard Intertech class, but don't live in state, do be aware that any of our classes can be attended remotely. This can be very beneficial to the attendees.  Not only do they reduce some travel and hotel expenses, but they can be "close to home base" to respond to any fires at work which pop up.

And, I suppose you *could* attend class in your PJs if you really want to (don't worry, we don't bother with any web cams).