Make Your Company’s Online Training Courses More Engaging in 5 Ways

Learning is part of work – learning the ropes, learning the rules, and learning new skills, and everything in between. The process isn’t always fun, and sometimes it isn’t as appealing. This unfortunately often leads to workers not having good retention of newly acquired knowledge.

Many offices and companies these days are adapting the e-learning style, which is a breath of fresh air from the usual classroom training style. However, since it’s self-paced and often unsupervised, online training materials should be more engaging and informative.

Here are some key points to remember when creating online trainings for your team:

There are times people get interested in a training course because of a title. Unless the training is mandatory, there’s a bigger chance your employees would click on an e-training module or video if the title is not as typical as Company Basics 101 or Company Training. Try elaborating a little bit so they have an idea of what it’s about, like Company Basics: Things You Need to Learn on Your First Week.

By nature, people are visual beings. Thus, using pictures would make content very interesting. Studies show that it even helps a person retain information, usually by associating an image with something they’ve learned. Make sure to use good pictures that are clear, visually appealing, and related to your training content.

The content should be as brief but concise as possible. Use pictures or videos as aides, and don’t beat around the bush. People get easily distracted, so keep sections as brief as possible. Even huge topics can be broken down into many short lessons. Studies prove that people learn more in 5 to 15 minute sessions.

In relation to the previous point, a good way to help people learn is to break information down into lists. When pictures aren’t enough, textual information in list form is always better than chunky paragraphs. However, whoever creates these training materials should maximize learning by leaving enough white space in between bullets, and keeping lists short. This makes it easier to read and less daunting to look at.

Help your training audience retain information by keeping them as active as possible. Simply letting them scroll through text, listen to audio, or watch videos/slides isn’t enough – challenge their learning by adding short quiz questions every few slides. Think of it as the online version of a pop quiz, which keeps their learning in check.