Online Oncology Training Webcasts

As a global organisation consisting of 168 offices in 56 countries worldwide, with its head quarters in Darmstadt, Germany, Merck needed a cost effective and centralised way to train its staff in the Far East region. Merck’s Far East Regional offices include Australia, China, India & Malaysia and spans across 6 time zones.

Telephoney was ruled out as being too costly, with the obvious choice being an internet based system, as this kept costs to a minimum but still allows participants to take part by submitting questions during the live presentations with immediate responses by the presenters, with the added advantage of online archives being available for those that couldn’t make the live presentation.

Vision 360 have long specialised in narrowband webcasting, reaching the audiences that other broadband providers discount as “unreachable” or “of little value”.

During initial briefing it was decided that a dedicated micro-website (www.merckoncologyonline.com) should be created that could be updated over time with relevant supporting information & content.

Using a system similar to the one we had pioneered for Dell a year previously (which is still in weekly use), we created an elegantly simple solution based on our ezpresenter system. While the presenter sat in our in-house recording studio, we encoded and broadcast it on the web at a narrow enough rate to work on any modem speed, down to 14.4kbps. The slides for the briefing were converted from Powerpoint to Flash and simultaneously broadcast live, any incoming questions were relayed to the presenter who was able to answer them during his presentation.

Within a couple of hours the entire 2 hour presentation was archived permanently on the web allowing the participants to view and download the presentation wherever and whenever they want.

It is still early days, as this was the first of a series of monthly training sessions planned by Merck on Oncology, but it has received numerous favourable feedback from the participants, some asking for bi-weekly sessions.

“The webcast is great! I was able to view the whole broadcast without a problem. Both audio and video is excellent. Looking forward in having sessions like this sooner than what was originally proposed. Congratulations to everyone who organized this activity.”.