Officials from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow will speak at the Interactive Distance Learning Conference in Washington, D.C. on Friday. But they won't have to leave Russia.


The international meeting will happen through a new video-conferencing room set up in southwest Moscow by MelCor International, a Boston-based educational network company.


The embassy officials will be able to interact with their audience with video, sound and a special digital white board, which works like a chalkboard that is transmittable to other boards in other places. Information is broadcast from Moscow via microwave and satellite to a tower in New York, where it is downloaded to a fiber-optic network and transmitted to its final destination.


Robert Parsloe, president and founder of MelCor International, signed a contract in December to set up the room with two partners, the Russian Academy of Tourism and the Russian Academy of Management. Between December and last week, Parsloe managed to get all the technology cleared for export from the United States, imported into Russia and installed in a room at the Academy of Management near Yugozapadnaya metro station.


VTel Corporation of Austin, Texas, produces the video-conferencing technology and the classroom terminals with their own proprietary software. The downlink in the United States is Sprint's Meeting Manager Network.


Tatyana Andreyeva, MelCor's deputy president, said that the company hopes to develop the room into a sort of international classroom, allowing Russian students to attend classes in the West and vice versa.


"For Russian students, it's too expensive to pay for an American education with travel and living costs," Andreyeva said. "But this way we can give an American education."


Political science students from all over Russia will attend the first classes, slated to begin in April with professors from the Kennedy School of Government and George Mason University. Students will have terminals they can use to ask questions, which the teacher will instantly receive and be able to answer directly over thousands of miles.


MelCor has put together a roster of classes that it hopes to carry, including 58 courses to be taught by American professors and 54 classes taught by faculty at the Russian Academy of Management.


The first students to attend such "field trips" are the students from Moscow elementary school 1411 and Wrentham and Millis elementary schools in Massachusetts.


Although using video conferencing as a teaching tool is cheaper than sending students to the United States, it is still out of reach for most students. The cost for a link, which uses the equivalent of 12 regular telephone lines, is $18-20 a minute.


To bridge the financial gap, MelCor is trying to find sources of funding within Russia and from federal and private organizations in the United States.


"It's not for the elite," said Parsloe. "We're looking for qualified students -- anybody who has a yearning to learn."


He said that the Academy of Tourism would help to locate students as well as find financial aid for those who need it. The Academy of Management, in addition to providing curriculum, is also providing facilities for the room and office space for MelCor.


"We have a very close alliance," Parsloe said. "We support their mission, which is education."


MelCor also hopes to sell the room for business and political meetings.


Parsloe said at least a hundred companies from the United States, Germany, Britain and Canada have approached himabout using the facilities for either corporate meetings or skilled training sessions.


"We already have an advertising company interested in six hours a month for meetings between the United States and Germany," Andreyeva said.


Parsloe has also started to work on setting up a session between the State Duma and the U.S. Congress, which currently has video-conferencing technology installed but does not use it.