I've been doing a lot of research into alternative technologies for the classroom recently. Unfortunately, the perfect application (or something even close to it) isn't available, at any price. The biggest drawback we see to everything that is out there is that nothing supports LaTeX - nothing would be compatible with the scripts we've written and nothing would allow us to convey mathematics cleanly and elegantly. The second biggest drawback is that nothing would allow us to have a nice text transcript. (Though most would allow reat-time playback of the class.)

On the plus side, they permit screen sharing and audio, and permit us to have a window sitting on the screen at all times with the current problem. I'm not sure how screen sharing would affect people on dial-up, but coupling this with something that would allow us to write on our computer screen would allow a great deal of instructional flexibility.

Our current classroom is a customization of a chat room. That chat room is about to move on to its next edition, and it's not clear that they'll be willing to incorporate LaTeX in it for any reasonable price. All the aforementioned options certainly won't incorporate LaTeX at any price - the companies are way to big to be interested in a small custom job.

Furthermore, the most whizzy stuff doesn't run on a Linux server, which would mean we'd have to maintain a second server for the classroom (more expense, more tech management). This also means that it can't be connected easily to our registration database (worse yet, the people I talk to there don't even understand the issue - they keep asking 'why don't you just schedule meetings with outlook?' Grrrr.)

So, I think for the foreseeable future we'll stick to what we have, but I am curious to hear from our users about which features they would most like to add, and how important features like a text transcript are.

Part of the confusion on this issue is compounded by apparent vs. real value. People who just experience our classroom for a few minutes might immediate be dissuaded - no white board, no audio. They may not realize how useful text transcripting is (can't do this with audio) and how useful LaTeX is. Consistently, people seem to prefer text transcripting over audio transcripting (in the few places where audio transcripting even exists) because you can scan text. And those who experienced any algebra-intensive classes from our early days can testify to LaTeX.