Kim’s Passion for eLearning
As an ardent advocate of multiple forms of education, Kim Handysides has a passion for eLearning and its varied applications. Born of a long line of educators, and a top voiceover narrator herself, she coaches actors and laypeople how to engage with learners who aren’t in the recording studio with you. Having studied instructional design as a multimedia platform during her Communications BA, Kim dove deep into the medium in the mid ‘90’s (briefly as a writer) and whole heartedly as an eLearning voiceover artist. Kim strongly identifies with her role as the conduit between the instructional designer, the SME and the learner and her voice features on over three dozen Award winning and thousands of other eLearning programs. Her friendly, conversational, engaging voice over is ideal for making technical and dense material clear.
Kim’s eLearning voiceover experience
spans thousands of projects in:
Medical, pharmaceutical & health care
Compliance, legal, & onboarding
K-12, college & university courses
Software & product sales
Mining, energy & electricity training
Banking, Investments & financial services
Fitness, beauty & cosmetics
Real estate & construction
Aviation, aerospace & automotive
Government & non-profits
Peer-recognized as a leader in eLearning voiceover narration, Kim has appeared as both exhibitor and speaker at several eLearning and Voiceover conferences. These conferences include DevLearn, the Bank Trainer’s Conference, WOVO, VO Atlanta and VO North. Prolifically blogging about both eLearning and the voice over industries, Kim also coaches voiceover talent and laypeople on how to best deliver learnable content effectively.
The Meteoric Rise of eLearning
BOOST IN EMPLOYEE
ENGAGEMENT
18%
HIGHER REVENUE
PER EMPLOYEE
26%
PRODUCTIVITY
BOOST
50%
FASTER LEARNING
CURVE
60%
LESS ENERGY
CONSUMPTION
90%
eLearning Narration Strategies:
Increase Retention & Foster Behavior Change
The strategies of different e-learning programs have different end-goals. Academic courses orient toward increasing learner retention, while corporate training programs seek behavior change to internal and external facing audiences. A voiceover artist who understands and performs her role with your specific project goals in mind, helps you achieve your KPIs and targets.
Pacing & Tone
Whether your online course is structured with long lectures or broken into micro learning, the pacing and tone of your voiceover talent is integral to the success of the audio part of your multimedia presentation. You want seamless audio quality, consistent pacing and varied rhythm. The tone? Something pleasant on the ear.
Style & Role
The style and role of the narrator has changed in eLearning. Gone are the soporific, robotic professors and here to stay are the character narrators. The quirky hipster, the genuine friend, the engaged peer, the conversational manager. There is still call for the authoritative professional narrator, but even the delivery of this style has changed to a more authentic read. The key to great narration no matter the role taken on is high engagement. These choices bring new life to the genre. The focus? Totally one-to-one.
The Takeaways
The key takeaway in high quality eLearning voice over narration? To give justice to a well thought out script, a good eLearning narrator must be either a subject matter expert who also has excellent, professional-grade storytelling capabilities or is an outstanding voice artist. Generally this means someone with both an acting background and experience with the educational process, who can present the material with the passion of a SME and keep the listener spellbound within the story of the script.
High-Level Interest
Genuine interest in the educational material at a high level is critical to robust learner engagement and program success. A career narrator, like Kim Handysides is a careful blend of actor, educator and professional speaker and can deliver on these goals.
eLearning Lessons
Healthcare &
Medical Specialty
A primary voice for internal sales rep courses for leading pharmaceutical companies for 20+ years, Kim has acquired a vast medical vocabulary and deep understanding of life sciences and health care. She has narrated an extensive volume of modules on the history of Health industries for the US government; safety and compliances courses for Health Canada; anatomy and surgical methods for Botox and plastic surgery procedures; and online instruction lessons in how to operate radiation machines for manufacturers of targeted radiology for cancer treatment
Business/HR/Legal
Compliance
One of Kim’s strong suits is assimilating dense, technical or dry material and making it interesting, even engaging for the learner. From dry legalese to complicated financial strategies, your program reaches its goal when the elearner retains the information you worked so hard to creatively produce. Better still when that learning leads to behavior change. Kim infuses your script with powerful, effective communication aimed at max imizing attention and retention and improving performance and productivity of your users.
Award Winning
Custom & Off the
Shelf
Kim’s work as a narrator has most often been found in custom eLearning, however, she was also the voice for a series of ninety-six (96) off-the-shelf courses for Adam Health. Several of these courses represent part of the over 2 dozen Communicator Awards Kim’s work has garnered. Her voice has also helped other online education companies win over a combined dozen Brandon Hall, IPL and IELA Awards.
Recent Selected eLearning Clients
WHO, Novartis, Celgene, BMS, Sanofi, GSK, United States Air Force, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp, HDR, Tech Mining, Seneca College, Accuray, Colorado State, Concordia U, LaSalle College, Stanford U, SUNY, UNICEF, Dun & Bradstreet, TD Bank, Options Industry Council, Deloitte, HDR
