Keeping learners engaged - it’s the boundless task as a facilitator.  There are a whole heap of ideas and tactics that work but here’s one I have used that may be a bit different… Shock your learners!  Embarrass yourself!  Give them what they never expected, SING loud and proud😊

I’ve been delivering online synchronous training for over 10 years and working almost exclusively remote for the past 3 years.  So why am I so exhausted at the end of every work-from-home day for the past 11 months?  Other than my kids ALSO being home for the past 11 months, I can point to one other thing that is different - my webcam. Before last March, I didn’t even have a working external webcam.  But for the past 11 months, nearly every meeting and training session I’ve been a part of has utilized my camera.  And it’s wearing me out. 

Lynette Van Steinburg has been contributing to the InSync Training team as a virtual producer since 2018. In this blog post, she shares some tips to help both the learners and the trainers stay focused without getting burned out.

It’s 7:30 AM on a Monday morning. I’m logged in to a Zoom call with 22 strangers. A scattering of novelists. A few bloggers. Two high school students working on homework. Some folks recording podcasts. And at least one person working on their taxes.

In my previous post, I discussed the importance of strong design for virtual delivery, and how to achieve it. This post addresses the challenges you’ll encounter when proposing these design approaches to your stakeholders.

2020 was a year that witnessed a myriad of changes in the workplace, society, and how we interact, work, play, and…live. In the world of learning and development, perhaps now it’s time to catch our collective breath, and review what we’ve done. 2020 was a year when members of the learning and development community (YOU!) were leaned on heavily to re-purpose, re-develop, and sustain professional development of the workforce in the pandemic.

Wait a minute...

With the unexpected arrival (at least at a much greater level) of teleworking and online teaching due to the Covid-19 pandemic, many trainers and facilitators have struggled to find the most suitable solution to deliver their classes to their students.

This boom in live remote learning has caused much debate about whether or not platforms help facilitators meet the expectations of their own students (and themselves) or whether online teaching is less stellar and effective than face-to-face classes.

A few years back, InSync producer Jakob Hofmann wrote some fun producer haiku.

Welcome to 2021.

It seems that everyone is taking a collective breath as we look forward with expectation of promise and insight in a new workplace environment largely mandated by long-term impacts of COVID-19. By the time the pandemic will be deemed “over”, a large fraction of the global developed workforce will have spent nearly two years in work-at-home environments, as many companies are targeting late 2021 for reopening their offices. Some others have rethought their workplace policy altogether. In October, DropBox announced its “Virtual First” strategy - as an ongoing policy “remote work (outside an office) will be the primary experience for all employees and the day-to-day default for individual work.” There is also evidence that employees want some voice in when and how they work from home, seeking a model of “flexible work” that complements, rather than intrudes upon, life at home.[i]

For the past 16 years it’s been an InSync tradition to offer a free “Holiday* Stressbusters” session in late November. It’s meant to be a helpful, mostly-lighthearted look at ways of coping with things particular to the holidays: too many parties with too much food and, ahem, beverage, the feeling of being overwhelmed by so much planning and buying and wrapping and whatnot, dealing with the tensions of family gatherings, etc.

*We specify that this is nondenominational and nonspecific. I like to note the day in December 2006 I finished graduate Statistics. However, most session conversation does tend to gravitate toward Christmas.