How do you create an interactive online training course?

Creating an interesting online training course and keeping participants engaged means taking care with both form and content. A subject is less engaging without real audience interaction. Here are some tips for making your online training interactive.

Online training: many advantages and a few disadvantages

There is no shortage of good reasons to create an online training course: it is a great way of passing on knowledge and skills without the need for attendance in person. You can broadcast your expertise to the other side of the country, or even the world, as long as you have an Internet connection.

Live or accessible later at any time, online training is a simple, effective way of sharing information:

• within your company;
• with other students on your course;
• with external learners, as a coach or training organisation.

With Glowbl, you also benefit from a platform that allows you to organise your lessons in advance, importing your documents, presentations and videos, which you can upload and then access every time you log in.

But no matter how fascinating your course is, it can lose its educational benefit if it just an online lecture, where the teacher speaks and the learner receives the information, separated by a screen with no means of interacting. One-way communication can bore and frustrate your audience, because exchange is essential for learning and understanding. To avoid the “master-pupil” effect, there is no substitute for making your remote training interactive.

Creating an interactive online course and encouraging exchange

Sharing is a key element of knowledge transmission. Even in distance learning, the students need to be able to interact with the teacher, ask questions, explain their difficulties or seek explanations about specific points. There are several ways of making online training more interactive:

• Ask questions during the course: to increase participant engagement, you can ask questions about the course. Everyone can respond via instant messaging, or orally using video conferencing;
• Encourage group discussions: during or after the course, set up a forum or chat room to speak with participants or enable them to discuss the course. This is an effective way of stimulating questions and getting participants to talk about their own experience;
• Propose tests of participants’ knowledge: a fun source of discussion, a questionnaire is also an effective way of reviewing the knowledge acquired. Tests can also be written or oral.

Glowbl allows you to add maximum interaction to your courses thanks to its comprehensive platform. Take advantage of private and public chats, video conferencing, document sharing and the option of setting up groups of participants to allow everyone to contribute and encourage interaction.