 You are the Vice President of a Toastmasters Club. You know your roles and responsibilities. But you are struggling to find the right resources to do justice to your role. If you are in this situation, then this video is for you. Let's get started. A Vice President Education role is one of the most critical roles in a Toastmasters Club. It requires you to be tech-savvy, especially with the introduction of the Pathways Education Program. And it requires you to access multiple resources to provide guidance to your members. I cover a number of resources in this video. To make it easy to find the right resource, I have created timestamps in the video description. Feel free to jump to a resource that is of interest to you. If you know of additional resources, please share the details in the comment section. Let's start with the most basic resource, the Club Central. Club Central is where we get all the important information of your club and members. To access Club Central, go to www.toastmasters.org and go to Leadership Central and select Club Central. If you are not already logged into the website, it will ask you for your login name and password. Enter that and click Login. Club Central is accessible only to the club offices and not to all the members. As a Vice President Education, the important elements of Club Central that you should be aware of is first, the Club Roaster. This gives you the details of all your members who are active and most importantly who are enrolled into Pathways. To access the Club Roaster, click here and you will be able to access all the club members details. If you want to do further analysis of the data, you can always download the information as an Excel file. You can quickly check if any member is not enrolled into Pathways. As a VP Ad, it is your responsibility to guide the member to select the right path and make sure the member is enrolled into Pathways. I have created a separate resource for new member orientation in Pathways. Please check it out and you can always share that video with any new member so that they get quickly oriented with the Pathways Education System. The next resource for you in Club Central is the Distinguished Performance Report which you can access from here. And this gives you a snapshot of your club's achievement for the current year. You can check how many goals you have achieved till date, your membership and your club alignment. In this case, we are aligned to Area 21, Division F, District 20 and Region 11. You can quickly check how many members have submitted awards in different levels in the Pathways Education Program and whether that particular goal has been achieved or not. To achieve the first goal, I need four members to complete Level 1 awards. As of now, I can see only two members have completed Level 1 which means I need to work with the other members to ensure at least two more members submit their Level 1 Education Award and this will become ticked. When you are checking your club status, you can also click on the club performance and this will give you the status of all the clubs in your district and how are they performing. If I was to go to my area, as of now, I can see that Area 21 comprises of four clubs and my club is in the top. Similarly, I could extend my comparison for the whole division or even the entire district and this is a good motivation for your club to compete to be the best in your area, division and even the district. Like most reports available on Toastmasters dashboard, you can download the file and open it as an Excel file for further analysis. If you want to do such analysis, I have a video explaining how you can download this file and create pivot tables in Excel to create graphs and other analytical information. I will post a link to that video. While you're exploring the dashboard, you may also want to check the daily reports and some of the reports that might be of use to you as a VP education is first of all the education achievements of the current year. This will download for you all the education awards of the entire district. You can also take this data to Excel and do further analysis. The other report in the daily reports is the triple crown report. This report shows you all the members in the district who have achieved a triple crown. Triple crown is when a member achieves three educational awards in the same year. Even the Toastmasters International publishes the triple crown report. The actual implementation of the triple crown depends upon your district. Some districts give triple crown based on this report while others have their own criteria in awarding the triple crown to their members. Check with your district team on the criteria applied in your district. Another important task you will do in Club Central is to submit education awards. But we'll come back to this after we have reviewed the Pathways Basecamp Manager role. As a VP education, you are the designated Basecamp Manager for your club. What that means is that you are responsible to review the projects done by your members to validate those projects and to approve those projects so that the members earn their education awards. To access Basecamp, you click on Pathways and go to Basecamp. If you are a member of multiple clubs, you can choose your club from the drop down list. Click continue. If you are a VP education of that club, you will get an extra option which says login as Basecamp Manager. As a backup, the president and the secretary of your club are also considered as Basecamp Managers. So whenever the VP education is not available, these two people can login as Basecamp Managers and complete the Basecamp Manager tasks. If you select a club and you are not the VP education or the president or the secretary of that club, then the option to go to Basecamp Manager is not available. So let me switch back to a club for which I am a Basecamp Manager and click login as Basecamp Manager. The Basecamp Manager dashboard is made up of three sections. The first is the pending request. When you click on it, it will show you any pending request from your members if they have completed their projects. As of now, there are no pending requests. If a member has completed a level and submitted his level for approval, it will appear in this list. And all you have to do is click on the approve button that appears so that the member can achieve his education award and move to the next level. Or reject the request in case the member mistakenly send the request for approval. The member progress section contains a number of reports for you to analyze the status of your member's education journey in your club. There are a number of reports which you can select by clicking on the appropriate report. And one thing in this section that you have to be aware is that you need to refresh the reports to get the latest information. And it's not very obvious how to refresh these reports. But if you move your mouse in this section, you will see this dropdown appearing. You click on it and you can click refresh. It will take some time and you can see that the data is being refreshed at the bottom here. And once this stops, then you know that this data is the most up to date data. This report shows me the number of members who are registered in different paths and whether they are in progress, whether they have completed and so on. This section is very useful because it shows me the number of members who are registered in pathways but have not yet commenced their pathway journey. And as a VP education, it is your responsibility to follow up with these members to encourage them to start delivering their projects. If you need more details on the names of the members, you can again click on the arrow here and click View Details. When you are done, click on the menu and go home. The third section is the Tutorials. And this section contains a number of videos explaining how to use the Basecamp Manager. I highly recommend you go through all these videos because they contain very useful information created by Toastmasters International. Explaining how to use the Basecamp Manager. If you want to know the details of specific members, then all you need to do is click on this profile button. This will open up your profile but it has an option here called View Team. When you click this button, you will get a list of all the club members who are currently registered in pathways. You may find a discrepancy between the list that is shown here and the list that is available in Club Central that we discussed earlier. And the reason can be two. One is that the member has joined your club but he is not yet registered in pathways. And as a VP ad, it's your responsibility to make sure that new members sign up for pathways and then their names will appear here. The second possibility is that the member belongs to multiple clubs. And if he or she changes their home club to a different club, then their names will not appear in this list. To check the details of a specific member, click on his name. This will take you to the profile of the member. To check the current status of this member, you can click on Parts and Learning. And this will show you the parts currently assigned to this member. In this case, I see that this member is pursuing effective coaching path. If I want to see his progress, what levels he has completed or projects he has completed, I can click on Open Curriculum, select the appropriate level. And we can see that the member has completed Icebreaker project but has not completed the other projects within that path. To check the details of another member, again you can click on Profile, View Team, choose the next member, click Parts and Learning. If a member has already completed a path, it will not appear in this list. But if you click on this arrow next to the active, you can select the completed parts. And in this case, I can see that this member has completed two parts already. If I select Dynamic Leadership, I can see that the member has completed all the five levels in that path. If I select a particular level, I am able to print the certificate for that member. Now that we understand how to navigate Basecamp, the next thing I would like to cover is these two systems that we encounter in Toastmasters, the Basecamp and Club Central. Even though we access them from the same place, there are actually two different systems. The Basecamp is what we call LMS, a Learning Management System. And this system is run by a company called CSOD, Cornerstone on Demand. And Cornerstone on Demand is a company that focuses on corporate training. And for this reason, you might find many references in Basecamp to employees. Even though we are not employees, we are members. Club Central, on the other hand, is managed by Toastmasters International. A good understanding of how both the systems work and how they are integrated to each other will answer many of our questions and the questions that our members ask us. And the important thing is you as a VP education is the person that really connects these two systems together. Let me explain. The Basecamp is where the member completes his levels and parts. But the recognition and the awards for completing those levels and parts will only happen once it is registered in Club Central. As mentioned earlier, Basecamp is the Learning Management System. And once a member signs up for a path, he or she will start their journey in completing the different levels. Starting with level one, move to level two, level three, level four, and finally level five, which means the member has completed the path. Club Central, on the other hand, stores your main Toastmaster profile. And this profile will contain all the information about you, the parts and levels that you have completed, the leadership roles that you have taken. All this is available in your Toastmaster profile in Club Central. A member's record of which levels and parts they have completed is also available in Club Central. Even though in Basecamp you might have completed a particular level or path, if it is not registered in Club Central, it will not show up in your main Toastmaster profile. And the question you may ask is, why does this not happen automatically? There are many reasons for this, but it is you as a VP education who discusses with the member when they have completed their levels in Basecamp to be submitted in Club Central. So they are reflected properly in the member's Toastmaster profile as well as in the club performance, especially when it relates to the Distinguished Club program. Club Central also stores the dashboard related information such as the Distinguished Club program and all of the other information required by Toastmasters International. The final distinction between Basecamp and Club Central I would like to highlight is the process itself. In Basecamp we approve, but in Club Central we submit. As VP education, you are the key person responsible for approving the levels and parts in Basecamp and then submitting those levels and parts in Club Central. In both cases, other EXCOM members can act as backups for the VP education, but the roles differ. In Basecamp, only the President and the Secretary are considered as backups for the VP education. So these three roles, VP education, President and the Secretary are considered as Basecamp managers. In Club Central, any of the seven EXCOM members starting from President all the way to Secretary can submit awards on behalf of the VP education. And the final bit of information that you should understand is that in Basecamp, a Basecamp manager can approve his or her own levels, though we don't recommend it, but it can be done. But in Club Central, there is a validation in place. If you are a VP education and you are trying to submit your own awards, you cannot do it. One of the other EXCOM members should submit that award for you. Now that you have a good understanding of how Basecamp works, how approvals work, how submissions work, you will still have questions. What is the best way to resolve your questions through the official channels? Your first go-to resource should be your own Club members, especially the senior members, those who have completed their DTMs, those who have completed their leadership journey. They have gone through the same experience and they will be the best people to guide you and to answer your queries. If you are unable to resolve your queries at the club level, you always have the support from your area director. The area director also has gone through a journey in Toastmasters. That's why he has taken up the next leadership role as an area director. Reach out to him. He's there to support the club. Beyond the area director, you will have the division director who would have even more experience in Toastmasters. If that is not enough, your go-to resource should be a district program quality director. The PQD has the overall responsibility for the entire district to ensure that all clubs adhere to the educational guidelines from Toastmasters International. He or she will have extensive experience in the Toastmasters education program and will be the best person to answer your queries. And your final resource is the World Headquarters. They are the authority on everything related to Toastmasters and they govern the entire Toastmasters program. They may take a little time to answer because they have so many clubs to take care of but they do eventually answer. If you want to reach out to World Headquarters to resolve your queries, there are multiple ways you can do that. The website, FAQ, email, chat and even telephone calls. Let's go through them one by one. The Toastmasters website www.toastmasters.org is a wonderful resource for all information related to Toastmasters clubs. There is so much information here. Sometimes it is difficult to find exactly what you are looking for. My go-to approach whenever I want some information from the Toastmasters website is to use Google. I make sure I freeze my query in Google by prefixing it with the word Toastmasters and let's say I want to know something about the annual speech contest. And it will take me straight away to that section in the website dealing with speech contests. In my role as a VP education, 80% of my queries have always been answered by just typing them in Google and going straight to the right resource on the Toastmasters website. The next section you should consider is the FAQ, the frequently asked questions. If you have a question, it usually means somebody also had the same question in mind. And if enough people have asked the same question, Toastmasters has created a section in their website called FAQ which you can find by scrolling to the bottom and click on FAQ. And there are questions related to all aspects of Toastmasters Club, education, pathways, ordering, shipping, etc. If you are interested only in pathways related questions, then there is a separate FAQ link available by clicking on Pathways FAQ. It takes you to the same area of the FAQ but these are all questions related to pathways. Go through these questions because usually they answer a lot of queries. If your query couldn't be resolved from the website or from the FAQ, click on the contactors. This will give you a list of all the email addresses that you can use to send your queries to world headquarters. Anything related to education is handled by educationprogram at Toastmasters.org. Click on it, send them an email, explain the situation and they will respond within a few working days. The next option available to you is a direct chat with a representative from the world headquarters. The only issue with this is you need to be aware of the working timings of world headquarters. If a representative is available, you will see an option called chat here. Currently not available, I guess they are still sleeping there in US. If your query is urgent and a representative is available, then you can always try the chat. And the last option is the good old telephone. You can pick up a phone and call. As long as you're calling from US, that should be fine. But if you're calling from outside US, you have to consider the cost associated with making an international call. I have Skype on my phone and Skype calls to US is 1 cent a minute, which is fine. Additional resources that you can access as a VP ad are your district website or perhaps your district has a Facebook group where you can post a query and members from your district will respond with a proper answer. There are several social media resources that I like to cover. On the top of your list should be the official Toastmasters International members group. Here members from around the world contribute and help each other. If you have a query, you can typically get a response within an hour, if not in minutes. If your query is specific to pathways, consider joining the Pathways Discussion Forum. With more than 11,000 members, you can expect a response from the members on any pathways query within a few minutes. Another Facebook group that you might consider is the Resources For Toastmasters. This group has more than 9,000 members and typically responses are also within a few minutes from other members. I have posted the links to all the three Facebook groups. Feel free to join them and benefit from other members supporting you. In addition to this, your own club, area, division might also have their own social media presence. Consider joining them, exchanging information with each other. In our part of the world, which is the middle list, the main form of communication is WhatsApp. Check what groups are available and the members in those groups might also be able to help you out. Your main responsibility as a VP education is to plan and execute meetings. That means filling up the speaking slots and the roles. This can be very challenging. Fortunately, there are a number of tools available for free for clubs to use. Two of the popular tools that I found was EasySpeak and WordPress For Toastmasters. EasySpeak is one of the oldest meeting management tools and recently it has been updated for the Pathways Education Program. This is a very comprehensive tool and there are many resources and tutorials dedicated only for EasySpeak. If you want to automate your task, then I highly recommend this resource. The other meeting management tool is WordPress For Toastmasters. This has a more modern look compared to EasySpeak. Test drive both of them and see if this is something that will help you and your members run your meetings more smoothly. So there you have it, a number of resources both official as well as unofficial to help and support you to become the best VP education and your club to become one of the best clubs in Toastmasters. I wish you all the best.