Are you interested in a work from home opportunity? Are you computer literate and a detail-oriented person? Do you have experience supporting WebEx Training Center, Adobe Connect, or any other virtual classroom platform? InSync Training wants to learn more about you! 

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.

Picture it: You’re a veteran virtual learning producer. You’ve arrived forty-five minutes ahead of a session, you’re well prepared…and everything goes wrong. Do you panic? Or do you put all your skills to good use?

InSync Training’s veteran producer Kathy Piazza managed to keep her cool in a high-pressure producing situation, and managed to keep the session moving and the learners on track.

In this blog post, she shares her step-by-step, moment-by-moment, rollercoaster ride of a session.

We chatted with veteran producer Brigit Michael and got her take on why she considers the virtual classroom to be a stage, herself a stage hand. Her unique perspective can help you hone your modern learning skills as you facilitate, produce, implement, and manage virtual learning events within your blends.

The role of a virtual producer is a unique one; we’re responsible for making everything run smoothly behind the scenes to ensure that learners have the best experience possible. 

I consider my role as a producer is kind of like a stage hand for a play. Some directors want the stage hands to be recognized and take a bow at the end, and some want them to fade entirely into the background, with a variety of possibilities in between.

Happy Virtual Classroom Producer Day!

To celebrate the occasion, we're honoring our own producers - the members of our instructional team who ensure our live online learning events go off without a hitch.

We asked our facilitators, project managers, and operations team what sets our producers apart, and these are just a few of their favorite things. 

In the live online learning environment, instructional teams often struggle to truly connect with learners. We don't have the benefit of greeting our online learners with a smile as they enter our virtual space. So how do we create an inviting, warm, inclusive learning environment? From experience, it really comes down to our tone of voice and our words.

As virtual facilitators and producers, we have to be cognizant of our tone and our words. Our words are often the only part of us that our learners experience. When preparing for a session, ask yourself, “How empathetic and open am I to really hearing what participants have to say?” “Do my learners tune out because my tone of voice seems disinterested or unyielding?” If you answered “yes” to either question, make a conscious effort to inject warmth and authenticity into your voice. It’s a small step that makes a big difference.

InSync Training’s team includes a group of fantastic virtual classroom producers, or assistant facilitators, who provide professional event support to our clients, and our Certificate course and Workshop facilitators. They keep learners on track, and transform virtual training programs into fast-moving, trouble-free interactive events. 

In this guest post, Helen Fong, our Lead Producer, shares her wisdom about this important, but often overlooked, role. 

The virtual classroom can be easy and work flawlessly but sometimes you get learners speaking out, saying they cannot see slides building, the slides are moving slowly or they cannot hear the presenter.  Or your learner’s keep getting kicked out of the platform.  Or you have one learner who can’t login. The list of things that can go wrong with learning technologies often seems endless but they’re easy to deal with when you’re prepared.

4-Step Disaster Recovery Process

As part of our Master Virtual Producer (MVP) Certificate course at InSync Training, we discuss and share the “4-Step Disaster Recovery Process,” which addresses how to diagnose problems and minimize anxieties to keep the session going.

With the exception of power outages, built-in web conferencing platform errors and internet failures, there are no disasters that you cannot tackle using this 4-step process.