The COVID-19 crisis has created unprecedented times for us all. Organizations are quickly becoming challenged with conducting day-to-day business with employees and customers. If your business is fortunate to leverage remote working for any number of employees, you have an opportunity and advantage to maintain some measure of work continuity.

Many organizations are quickly realizing that by implementing “work from home” policies, their workforce development, customer education, and marketing initiatives can also maintain continuity. There is a matter of gaining practical understanding and use of online training methodologies and tools. Embracing these methodologies and tools will allow you to continue training and educating your learners in a useful and meaningful way. Perhaps your organization has already invested in online training tools and platforms. If so, this gives you a head start. If you are new to these technologies, there is no time like the present to embrace and adopt in the near future.

Outlined here are benefits and best practices you should know if you want to utilize online training.

Benefits of online training

With the COVID-19 crisis upon us, remote training makes perfect sense. As the virus disrupts normal corporate training routines, employers are looking for alternate means by which to ensure continuity in their training programs. But, given prevailing circumstances, where more and more employers will migrate to virtual training there will be multiple benefits:

  1. Employee and trainer health & safety: The utmost priority of HR departments is likely that of ensuring the safety and security of their employees – be they learners or training teams. If the workforce is unable to safely attend or deliver training events in-person, due to COVID-19 concerns, then hosting those learning events online ensures workers learn in the safety and comfort of their own homes
  2. Continuity in training: Employees who have no other option but to stay at home will not need to put their training/learning on hiatus. Through online/distance learning, they’ll continue moving learning milestones forward. This ensures that staff are adequately trained/prepared to resume “business as normal” (or as nearly as normal as possible) by the time this crisis passes
  3. Meeting mandated obligations: Most jurisdictions either already have, or will likely mandate travel restrictions in the coming days and weeks. Online training will enable companies to become good corporate citizens and honor such mandates, while at the same time move forward safely with their own staff development and corporate training responsibilities
  4. Low-cost alternate: Online remote training, supported by the appropriate digital learning solutions, is typically less costly than sending employees to attend in-person workshops, seminars and training courses. And, in this new COVID-19 paradigm, it is also a less risky option to implement

Though remote training’s benefits discussed here might entice organizations to immediately embrace digital learning, doing so requires some thought and planning. Making the most of remote learning isn’t about simply digitizing training content, hosting it on a cloud server, and then hoping to reap its benefits.

Recommended tools for creating and managing online training

There are several tools for efficiently creating and effectively managing online training that can help organizations reap the benefits discussed above. These range from communication technologies, to tools used for creating eLearning content and managing online courses. Some recommended tools in these domains include:

  1. Web Conferencing: Tools like Adobe Connect, Zoom, GoToMeeting, and Microsoft Teams are exceptional for online, remote group communications and collaboration. However, Adobe goes a step further with tools that support online classroom/webinar training, interactive quizzes, gaming and polling.
  2. Storyboard Development: Microsoft PowerPoint is a powerful presentation tool that supports the creation of visually-stimulating slide decks and pitches. However, organizations may also leverage its features for storyboarding eLearning course ideas, and developing narration scripts. Its ubiquitous nature, and availability of an online cloud-based version (as part of Office 360), makes this an especially suitable tool for remote eLearning team collaboration.
  3. ELearning Course Authoring: These tools offer great opportunity to excite and engage self-paced learners with approaches such as gamification, team challenges, leaderboard tracking, and richer engaging learning content built upon solid instructional design. Included in our recommended list of such tools are Articulate Rise and Storyline. Rise is great for more rapid eLearning, while Storyline is a good resource for more highly interactive, engaging learning that uses gamification and simulations.
  4. LMS: Learning Management Systems are exceptional tools to deliver on-demand training to remote audiences. LearnDash LMS is our top-of-the-line pick, with Matrix LMS and Talent LMS close behind. LMS’s ability to build personalized learning paths, track learner’s progress, monitor performance, deliver online feedback and maintain and manage course content makes them an ideal tool for remote eLearners and HR departments alike.

Longer-term training opportunities

Companies that successfully navigate the current COVID-19 crisis and who implement efficient and effective remote training programs will reap longer-term benefits from these efforts. First, they’ll have optimized training strategies able to respond to future crisis situations. And secondly, the lessons they learn through this deployment will empower them to deliver remote training at an unprecedented scale – something that will give them a competitive edge over some of their peers.