From Face-to-Face to Global Virtual Delivery

I’m in Bogota, Colombia this week, observing a day long face-to-face delivery of a business writing course for English speakers to convert to a global virtual delivery.  The virtual delivery of this course will be piloted with several countries in the Middle East.

This means that the content needs to be truly global and examples and images must be meaningful across different countries.  One thing we learned in the live delivery was that a reference to a “lightning bug” wasn’t meaningful to the English speaking Latin American audience.  Also participants had never heard the word “toil” as part of an example of using short words in the famous Winston Churchill speech “I have nothing to offer you but blood, tears, toil, and sweat.”