From default remote learning to remote learning as a pedagogical renewal

Testimonial from two trainers at AEFE

On June 24 and 26, Marie-Camille Fourcade and Sébastien Malagnoux — both trainers with AEFE (the Agency for French Education Abroad), one in History-Geography and the other in English, working in the Iberian zone — shared their experience with their peers after a first year of using Glowbl.

Given the richness of their insights, we’ve made the replay available and enriched it with a few resources to help you apply the same tips and techniques used by these two outstanding educators.

Marie-Camille : “Glowbl helps challenge the negative perceptions of remote learning as a downgraded or second-rate training experience.”

In each of her training sessions on Glowbl, Marie-Camille uses the “step-by-step” feature, which allows her to create a sequence of stages and link each one to specific content, backgrounds, and facilitation tools.
This approach has highlighted just how much precision remote learning design requires — a true exercise in “miniature clockwork.

Far from seeing this level of precision as a constraint, she emphasizes that it aligns perfectly with best practices in the field of distance learning: anticipating every step, encouraging active engagement, and fostering peer-to-peer interaction. Glowbl’s step-by-step scenario builder makes this easier by guiding trainers through the process.

For her, this structural support enables a rich and engaging remote learning experience — one that can help shift the often negative perceptions associated with this modality. The platform becomes a driver of transformation: not only do pedagogical practices adapt to the tool, but the tool in turn shapes and evolves those practices.

She concludes by highlighting that digital transformation and pedagogical transformation are not sequential, but simultaneous. With Glowbl, remote learning is no longer “a downgraded version of in-person training — it becomes a true laboratory for new forms of learning.”

Once you’ve mapped it out, building your step-by-step scenario on Glowbl takes just five minutes.
Your scenario becomes a reusable template that you can duplicate and adapt to different content. The result? Less cognitive load during your session. No more searching for files, switching between tabs, or creating a last-minute poll — everything is ready to go!

As Marie-Camille points out, committing to a structured scenario is also a way to approach remote training with the same care and rigor as an in-person session.

Curious to learn more?
Before diving into our Help Center article “Creating a Scenario”, take a look at our quick guide: “3 steps to a scenario that works.” You’ll see that running a smooth, engaging session doesn’t require complexity — just a little structure.

Sample facilitation plan: Training on secularism

This is a 3-hour self-paced course to which an introductory and a concluding video session were added. The goal of these live sessions was to increase participant engagement throughout the course.

Marie-Camille and the Secularism Coordinator designed two collaborative activities during these synchronous moments, encouraging peer cooperation and interaction to enrich the learning experience.

🎯 The value of running a rotating table activity on Glowbl

For Marie-Camille, the value of this setup lies in the fact that her fellow participants didn’t need to move around physically

“ They didn’t have to leave the room, open another window, or use a third-party collaborative document outside of Glowbl — everything took place within the same environment.”

The chosen background featured two carpets: on the left, “Agree” and on the right, “Disagree” — the perfect setup for an activity commonly used in in-person training: the moving debate.

In this case, participants were invited to move — or rather, to move their bubble — according to their stance on a statement displayed at the center table. Five statements were presented and discussed during the session. The floor space between the two carpets symbolized a zone of uncertainty or hesitation.

This gamified approach to the final session proved particularly valuable from a pedagogical standpoint, especially given the sensitive and complex nature of the topic.

Check out our Help Center to learn how to change a table layout — or even create your own!

🎯 The value of running a moving debate on Glowbl

The moving debate is an activity that works well in person — and Glowbl makes it easy to adapt it to a remote setting.

“Some might say that you could do the same things with Zoom — and I think that’s true, but only in a very hands-on, manual way.
Yes, you can find workarounds to run similar activities, but in my opinion, they’ll feel less seamless.

With Glowbl, you gain in fluidity, in immersion, and therefore in engagement — especially thanks to the use of avatars that can move within a meaningful environment, one that visually supports the facilitation and the learning intent.”

Following these two sessions, Marie-Camille didn’t hear any of the usual comments like “It would have been better in person.”
Even better — some of her colleagues said they wanted to reuse both activities in their own classes, not only online… but also in face-to-face settings!

“I find it quite meaningful that colleagues can draw inspiration from what they experience remotely and decide to apply it later in their in-person classes.
Remote learning can, in fact, help model effective teaching practices.
In that sense, I believe Glowbl offers a richer experience than what platforms like Zoom can provide.”

Sébastien: “What made us happiest was seeing colleagues, inspired by what we did with Glowbl, start using new facilitation techniques in their own classrooms.”

Sébastien discovered Glowbl during an inter-zone training session called Le Suivi Linguistique.
The objective? To support colleagues who wanted to improve their English, with the ultimate goal of teaching their own subject in that language.

Until then, the training — which had been running for 3 or 4 years — was conducted via Zoom.
But in light of the need for more interactive exchanges, the team decided to switch to Glowbl in an effort to boost participant engagement.

Here’s what convinced them to switch platforms :

Empowering participants and fostering co-learning

👉 Another advantage of this single, “open” space is:

“We realized that some of our colleagues were arriving before us, since the space is open and accessible independently of the facilitators.
Unlike Zoom, there’s no waiting room — participants can enter the space freely.
Some would join 10 or 15 minutes early and review the collaborative notes, going over the vocabulary we had worked on.

It was clear that this setup gave them a real sense of autonomy — both in how they accessed the platform and how they managed and revisited the notes taken during the sessions.”

Following this realization during the year, the Suivi Linguistique team has decided to redesign the learning experience to give more room to co-learning.

“We’re evolving our practices for next year. Thanks to Glowbl, the space can now exist without us.
We’ve been able to multiply these sessions. Since we’re 18 English trainers, and the program includes 22 sessions, each of us normally has to facilitate two or three sessions.
But now, that’s no longer necessary — there are times when we simply tell our colleagues:
“Just meet up on the Glowbl space. It’s the same link. The document will be ready for you, and you can work independently. We’ll pick it up again next week.”

So, we’ve created even more autonomy in the way we operate with Glowbl.
Something we couldn’t do with Zoom — because with Zoom, someone has to open the session, be present, and manage everything manually.

As Marie-Camille mentioned, we can really see that our colleagues have taken ownership of the tool.”

Here too, thanks to this training, Sébastien points out that the participant-trainers have adopted and reused the various teaching methods they observed.

“And what made us happiest — just like Marie-Camille — was seeing colleagues who had passed the additional certification and started teaching their subject in English in their own classrooms.
Even better, they drew directly from what we had done with Glowbl, reusing some of the facilitation techniques in their in-person classes.

So in a way, the virtual became something tangible and physical — classroom strategies inspired by what we demonstrated on Glowbl: working in small groups, fostering autonomy, and building trust so students could work independently, even without the teacher constantly guiding them, while developing their language skills.

For us, the outcome has been extremely, extremely positive.”

💡 To benefit from this support, visit the agenda section on our Glowbl website, join one of our Academies, attend a hands-on workshop, or contact us directly via this form.

We would like to thank AEFE — and in particular Jérôme Bousquet-Carton, Alain Michel, and Agnès Constant — for making this exchange possible and organizing it so smoothly.
Of course, a special thanks goes to Marie-Camille Fourcade and Sébastien Malagnoux for their dedication and willingness to share their practices.

Feel free to share the replay and this article within your networks and organizations.
And for those in a hurry, this short excerpt focuses on one key question:

Glowbl — from default remote learning to remote learning as a driver of pedagogical renewal, even as a lab for in-person training?