Designing for face-to-face delivery is hard enough. How do you transfer those skills to the virtual- and blended-delivery environments? The shift can be daunting because instructional designers don’t have as much experience in virtual deliveries as participants do. Couple that with the fact that when a design falls apart, the participants usually know about it before the facilitator does so spending time on a tight design is critical up front. Plus, designing in the wrong way can be expensive when it comes to programming and technology adoption costs.

Like many organizations in today’s increasingly global marketplace, the Asia Pacific Region of World Bank Group has a workforce in 20 countries. The regional team has the daunting task of training global staff in an efficient manner. Since World Bank knowledge workers are also mobile and tech savvy, moving training to a virtual classroom that can be accessed on a laptop or mobile device was a logical solution.

We’ve all been there—as a participant in a one-way, presentation-only style webinar. Presenters may know how to click through a series of slides, but that type of session isn’t very engaging to the learner. Also, although Adobe Connect is one of the most popular platforms for live online learning, it’s also one of the more complicated to learn to use its full feature set.

If you find running online sessions difficult, and you and your learners waste time setting up activities and solving technical problems, you’re not alone. Even the most experienced online presenters can struggle to manage the software and deliver a clear message at the same time. An online session producer can provide the structure and support that allow presenters to stay focused on content and keep learners engaged.