Best known for its 24-hour telephone counselling services, Lifeline Australia answered more than 450,000 calls for help over the 2002 - 2003 financial year and trained thousands of volunteers to take those calls.

It is critical that volunteers donating their time for Lifeline's 24-hour call centre are adequately trained to deal effectively with callers who may be distressed or require urgent assistance.

The nationally accredited training in telephone counselling offered by Lifeline Australia is an ideal way to gain the necessary skills.

Lifeline Australia is using new technology that integrates online communications with conventional teleconferencing to support and train their trainers nationwide. 'Telstra Webconferencing' uses satellite technology and enables real-time multimedia communication to occur during a teleconference.

Lifeline Australia's National Training Coordinator Fay Mound said the trainers participate in a teleconference in the usual way while at the same time they can view training materials and undertake tasks online via an Internet linked computer.

The system does not require the installation of any special software. All that is required is a telephone and a computer connected to the Internet.

"We are now using 'Telstra Webconferencing' to work online with our trainers at the 42 community based member centres we have throughout Australia. 24 of the centres are in rural and remote areas," she said.

Before choosing this approach, the team undertook extensive research into the best way to apply new technology to enhance the learning outcomes for their trainers through a nationally funded professional development project called LearnScope.

Fay said, "We investigated investing in a learning management system but found it was expensive and required a lot of set up time and expertise. We needed to reach a relatively small number of people and we needed a training tool that was easy to use and set up."

She said compared to face-to-face training this approach was cost effective and time saving.

"We can electronically distribute a range of training materials and assessment tools to our trainers and work through them online in groups of up to six trainers at a time. This online approach has the potential to improve the quality and national consistency of the training we do with our trainers."

"We also felt that the real time aspect of Telstra Webconferencing, together with the teleconferencing aspect, would be better received by our students who had varying degrees of computer expertise."

"The trainers said they really enjoyed and benefited from the technology enhanced teleconferences. In 2003 we held 14 training sessions in this way with 65 Lifeline trainers in all 42 centres around Australia."

"We used the technology when we delivered training on Lifeline's resource database. The participants were asked to complete a search of the database to locate the relevant information, for example the contact details for the closest women's refuge in order to demonstrate their competency in the task. We could see how each participant was doing the task and give instant feedback," she said.