Videoconferencing: Help me spend someone else's money!

I’m currently employed for a small regional psychological training center that is looking into options for webcasting and videoconferencing to improve our outreach into the surrounding area. Due to being the only non-raving technophobe, the initial brainstorming for this has been left to me… which doesn’t make me particularly qualified. I’m hoping against hope that somebody here might be!

To give a quick rundown of what we’re looking for the setup to do:

  1. Allow students from around the region to log-on and participate in classes in real-time. This may or may not include the ability for them to webcam themselves into the class rather than participate via a chat client. It’s VERY important that the quality of the video stream to them be as top-notch as possible, since they consider body language a high priority (remember these are psychologists!).

  2. Possible to use for committee meetings with members who cannot make it in.

  3. Record and archive classes/presentations for future use by members.

We’ve got a building fund that this could potentially come out of, so consider the price cap to be somewhere around $10,000 for the initial purchasing. What hardware/software/training would be involved with this?

Appreciate any thoughts you could give me!