First impressions are key to developing rapport with learners in any classroom, but especially in the virtual environment. Facilitators in the virtual classroom must grab the attention of the learner right away and keep it to be successful here.

When trainers fill their delivery with verbal crutches, learners get distracted and possibly annoyed.

In the modern classroom of today, trainers find themselves in various situations they may not have prepared for. One of common situation is going virtual.

Does this sound familiar? You’re going along training for years and then BOOM your company decides to jump on the virtual classroom train. The big question settles in, “How do I make this virtual classroom space feel like a face-to-face classroom?”

Are you one of the many accidental trainers out there? The function or topic expert so good at their job that management asked you to train others in your organization? You aren't alone! InSync Training's lead facilitator Karen Vieth discusses four key areas you can focus on to become a dynamic virtual facilitator. Learn how to identify your natural skill, learn tips and strategies for better virtual facilitation, and take your sessions to the next level — on purpose.

Chances are, you didn’t dream of being a virtual facilitator when you were little. But here you are, quite by accident. You may have recently graduated and landed a sales position that turned to training. Or you had a job for a while and found yourself in the training department years later. Regardless of how you landed in training, it's a great spot to be, where you help others learn the tricks of the trade.

This is the second part of a blog post from our guest blogger, Susan Bassett. To view the first post, "It's Amazing What Creating Online Energy Can Do!," click here. 

Passion and Courage
Love what you do. Whether you call yourself a trainer, instructor, facilitator, presenter; the nom de guerre doesn’t really matter. Being a great online trainer requires soft skills and a high level of motivation to share your passion about the subject being presented.

This is the complete opposite of finding yourself online with a trainer who reads the slides and notes word for word. Listen in on any outstanding online trainer and you will experience passion about using their energy to impact other people’s lives.

With that passion, comes calculated risk that requires courage. If you want people to learn before, during, and after your online training, create a safe learning environment where risk is encouraged.

This is the first part of our guest blogger Susan Bassett's two-part blog post. The second post will be published Tuesday, February 27, 2018.

I’ve been presenting online since 2001. I’ve always felt a certain sense of excitement when working with top-notch trainers and producers in creating active, energetic online sessions. Terrific online professionals make choices about how they present which results in transforming distracted, impatient, and overwhelmed attendees into engaged learners. (Bersin). Ask dynamic, effective online trainers what their “secret sauce” is and you’ll hear about presence, energy, passion and courage. And now, comes the best part, they are more than willing to share.

In Jennifer Hofmann’s blog post, The Role of Virtual Classrooms in Modern Blended Learning, she states that the focus of virtual learning should be fundamentally on the learners, their experiences and their learning environments. And I agree. But I encourage you to expand that focus to include collaboration.

I believe it is the ability for learners within those experiences and learning environments to make connections, participate in collaborative efforts and tie back to real life and work situations that turns a webinar type session into a real lesson where learners are eager to come back for more. 

The virtual classroom has a lot of advantages. We can create a learning environment which promotes interactivity and collaboration among learners. We can deliver a lesson to remote learners with minimal delivery costs. We can easily engage subject matter experts in the learning process.

But even with these advantages, we still have concerns about how effective virual learning is and how to determine if learners are meeting the objectives of the lesson.

Each learning environment requires facilitators to develop certain skills to promote learner success. Classroom facilitators benefit from participant body language. They know, based on the energy in the room, whether content resonates with learners, or if it doesn’t. Adapting the presentation based on learner needs has become second nature in the classroom, and with depth of experiences comes comfort – classroom facilitators know how to stay on track and on schedule.

In the virtual classroom, though, many facilitators, even seasoned veterans, struggle to manage their time. In fact, I believe time management is one of the key competencies facilitators must develop for this learning environment.

When used as a competency, I define time management as, “the ability to manage a session so that you know learners are engaged, while also ensuring that learning takes place and the session finishes on time.”

Recently InSync Training worked with a multinational software company to maximize the value of their existing learning content by transitioning it to the virtual and blended classroom.

During this process, we discovered seven specific areas that we needed to address to facilitate this transition. We believe these challenges are universal to virtual classroom and blended learning implementation. Many other organizations are undergoing this evolution, with seasoned learning professionals assisting the process.

In the spirit of the modern classroom, a learning environment defined by the accessibility of knowledge, we will detail these challenges and our approaches for overcoming them in this seven-part blog series.

To achieve the greatest understanding of virtual classroom strategy implementation challenges, begin with my first blog post, Redesigning Content for the Virtual Classroom.

Virtual Classroom Implementation Strategy Challenge 2: Preparing Facilitators

The second obstacle we faced while implementing our client’s virtual classroom strategy involved reskilling the program facilitators.

Once a virtual facilitator possesses the macro-level skills required to create an impactful virtual classroom learning experience, they must then own the role every day. In this video, Jennifer Hofmann explains at a high-level the additional task-based competencies of the virtual facilitator.