It goes back to 1939 when Iowa School district (USA) started using telephones for provision of teaching to children ill at home or in hospital. In Britain, a national educational audioconferencing service (PACNET) was set up in 1984 at Plymouth Polytechnic; however, although the system was of an excellent quality, it was unable to build up a big enough user base, and only lasted for two years. The British Open University makes some use of telephone conferencing for students in isolated areas of Scotland and Wales.
Telephone conferencing can be used for group teaching, with results comparable to those found in face-to-face classes [], for subjects diverse as music teaching (Perenchief and Hugdahl, 1982), language teaching (Oksenholt, 198l;Kaye and Kerbrat, 1992) or in-service teacher training (Burge and Howard, 1990). In traditional distance education programmes, telephone meetings can be used with success for students unable to attend face-to-face tutorials (Robinson, 1991; Rekkedal 1989).
The basic principles which determine the success of learning in groups are the same whether the group is meeting face-to-face or by telephone. However due to the lack of visual cues, the teacher has to pay more attention to the following aspects than in a face-to-face class [] :