How To Embrace Advantages Of Online Training: 5 Killer Examples
Online training is the future of corporate learning; that is what studies tend to explain. Nevertheless, it is important to clearly identify the benefits of this trend, and how you can use them in your corporate training strategy. In this article, we are going to discuss the main advantages of online training, coupled with 5 practical examples to best illustrate them.
1. Reach Learners Worldwide.
Among all the different advantages of online training, this is a huge one. Indeed, distance has always been a barrier in the corporate training field. Above all when it comes to big companies, with a lot of workers to gather in a common place. When you add up travel costs and time, lunches, hotels, plus the amount of energy deployed by everyone to get there, you realize that a single training session represents a lot of investment, in terms of budget and people availability. Nevertheless, thanks to new web authoring tools available on the market, this is not a big deal anymore.
Instead of handling all the costs listed above, you can simply make a one-time investment to create your serious games once and for all, and then offer them to your audience, worldwide, and without effort. The great thing is that, once you have completed your serious game development, you are good to go: No more travel costs, no more hotels, no more lunches, no more jet lags…
Now, your learners can follow their learning simulations whenever they want, from wherever they want.
2. Make Sure Learners Understood Key Concepts Of The Course.
Unless you setup workshops, it is kind of hard to make sure your learners understood the key principles of your lesson. You still can check if they pay attention, by asking questions, and maybe assess their understanding with a quiz. However, at the end of the day, having a great mark to a quiz is not a good metric to make sure they acquired the skills you are trying to transmit. They could get all of the correct answers just by being lucky, or by remembering some sentences that they were told during the course and recognizing the wording in the quiz. But it does not mean that they fully understood the concepts behind it.
That is the reason why workshops are so great: They enable learners to take action and actually apply the knowledge they just learned. But workshops are time consuming, and thus costly. Consequently, this is not always the right way to go.
That is when advantages of online training truly shine. The great thing about serious games is that learners actually have to make the right decisions to get a high score, or sometimes just to finish the training simulation. Thus, if they did not understand the key concepts of the course, chances are they will not fulfill the training. That is a way better metric than the simple quiz.
3. Enhance The Engagement Rate In Your Corporate Training.
Going back to school, do you remember those kids in the back of the class, not paying attention to a single word of what the teacher was saying? Maybe you were actually part of this group. Well, these kids were clearly not engaged in their learning.
It might be an extreme example, but we kind of see the same phenomenon in corporate training. The support you chose to transmit knowledge has to be engaging. Learners must be willing to take that course, and to engage with it. Talking about training tools, you can now leverage the different advantages of online training proposed by new serious game authoring tools, in order to make your training simulations more engaging than ever.
Indeed, by writing great scenarios, encapsulated with a nice storytelling as well as great graphical environments, you are on your way to create engaging learning content.
By giving to your learners the opportunity to interact with the environment of their training, they are more likely to engage. Making their own decisions. Choosing the characters they want to play with. Facing different situations, based on their behavior. They are actually the heroes of their own story. And that is engaging.
4. Get An Accurate Visibility On Your Learners’ Results.
Previously, we talked about making sure that your learners understood the core principles of your course. Of course, how can a training be useful and efficient if your audience did not retain the information? We also talked about the assessment part, and the fact that quizzes were not that great to have an accurate visibility on the strengths and weaknesses of your learners.
Once again, here you can leverage the advantages of online training to get a more accurate visibility on your learners’ results.
Fortunately, once you are done with your serious game development, SCORM compliant authoring tools enable you to export your training simulation to the SCORM format (SCORM 1.2 & SCORM 2004). After that, all you have to do is import your training content into your Learning Management System platform, and you are good to go.
Thanks to this process, you can now step back from your Learning Management System and analyze the results your learners are getting. Below are some metrics you will be able to observe:
- Time spent on the module.
- Results obtained per pedagogical goals.
- Number of times the module has been completed.
- And much, more more!
5. Enable Your Learning Strategy To Be More Flexible.
Last but not least: Flexibility. This benefit stands for both trainers and learners. For trainers, because they will be able to design their serious games quickly and easily, at very affordable costs. Of course, 10 years ago, the only way you could create serious games was to contact an eLearning agency. It was expensive, and was time consuming, and sometimes you even did not get the expected results.
Fortunately, new serious game authoring tools changed the way things are. Nowadays, you can find great tools such as ITyStudio, with ready-made libraries of content –both in 2D and 3D– and affordable prices. Besides, the commitment period is pretty low –starting at 3 months– for an optimal use of the tool.
To conclude on the trainers’ benefits, ITyStudio is compatible with classical eLearning authoring tools of the market, such as Storyline and Captivate, to make sure that you build the most awesome serious games of all time!
Advantages of online training also apply to learners. As we mentioned above, they can follow the training whenever they want, wherever they want, from the device that they want. This is way more optimal than before. And this increases their engagement rate as well. Thanks to this flexibility, they will now connect not because they have to follow the training, but because they want to. And this mindset makes a huge difference in their results and their information retention.
Ready To Leverage The Advantages Of Online Training? Take Action!
In this article, we shared with you the main advantages of online training with 5 practical examples.
If you feel concerned and see a potential use of these benefits, you should definitely give ITyStudio a try!
This serious game authoring tool contains all the features needed to embrace the advantages listed above.
It is easy to use, it is engaging, and, best of all: You can try it for free!
Ready to go to the next level? Claim your 30-day free trial here.
