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If there's one thing, one piece of advice I can give you above all else for e-learning voiceover, it's this.
Be the teacher that everyone loves behind the mic!
So you may have noticed that most casting specs today are calling for authentic, believable, conversational, like you're talking to your best friend. Well, guess what? That also applies for e-learning. Do you remember back when you were in grade school, and I think all of us had that favorite teacher? I know I did. I had a couple of favorite teachers, and there were many reasons as to why they were my favorite teachers. And I think the biggest reason why was because they really cared about me. They were enthusiastic, they were passionate about their topic, and they cared about me learning. It wasn't really about them just standing up in front of the classroom and just, you know, talking away and not really caring; although I have had teachers that have done that. Uh, but my favorite teachers were the ones that always took an interest in me and made sure that I understood what it was that they were trying to convey, what it was that they were teaching me, and they always had a great attitude about it.
So I want you to be that teacher behind the mic. It's really important that not just the lessons come through on the microphone, but your emotion and your heart and your service to your student who now has you in their ear. So I want you to be that teacher that everybody loves, and that I think is gonna be really elevating your e-learning game. Because as synthetic voices, AI comes onto the scene, there's going to be a lot of opportunities for e-learning modules to kind of go very mm, robotic.
If you've ever had a bad experience with an e-learning module, most likely it was because the sound in your ear or the narrator was pretty robotic and pretty boring. So I want you to switch that up and be that human teacher that really cares about their student. So that means you're going to have to really get into the scene, understand who it is that you're teaching, understand the age level because you will speak differently to a younger student than you will to let's say an adult student, and then understand the teaching moments in the lesson. That's important.
Now, I'm not saying that you need to go and learn everything that you're teaching; however, you need to understand what is the most important part of that sentence that needs to convey the lesson. So I call those the teaching moments. And those teaching moments have to be elevated a little bit into the ear of the listener. That means inflect upward just a little bit. Don't go crazy and get sing-songy and say, "here's my teaching moment." Don't get crazy and really elevate that teaching moment in a very unrealistic way. I want you to just elevate that pitch a little bit and stay a little bit longer in the ear, meaning lengthen those teaching moments. So "this is an important point," so "important point," I kind of lengthened it, and that way you have a better chance of really being effective in delivering that teaching moment to the student.
So the next time you're voicing an e-learning module, make sure you get into favorite teacher mode, and really care about what your student is hearing, and really care about elevating those teaching moments.
Thanks for reading!
Keep on rocking your business like a #VOBOSS
About Anne Ganguzza
Recipient of multiple Voice Arts Awards for Outstanding Narration Demo - Anne Ganguzza is California-based Voice Over Coach and award-winning Director & Producer specializing in target-marketed voiceover Demo Production. Anne's production team creates SOVAS-nominated demos across several genres, including Commercial, Corporate Narration, and eLearning, and her VO BOSS podcast is the winner of SOVAS Outstanding Podcast in 2022.