How can you make online training as engaging as face-to-face training?

I have found asking throughout the training what my audience needs as helpful. You are able to adjust and meet the needs of each unique learning group.

First and foremost, your subject matter must be something that you are passionate about. There is nothing worse than listening to someone rehashing a training that is bland at best. I refer to this as the"hot Pocket" readily microwavable topic. Sure it accomplishes the goal of providing information much in the same matter as a hot pocket satisfies hunger. Keep your material fresh, if you are passionate about your topic is a breeze and providing new and engaging content comes easily. People are for the most part are able to see right through someone who merely is being paid to rehash a canned, stale presentation versus someone who genuinely is invested in their content area.

Send out a pre-course survey and get the lay of the land. Evaluate what is the baseline for your audience, and gather as much info as you can on starting points, previous knowledge, level of skill, expectations, etc. This ultimately dictates the course pace, engagement, interactivity and overall success.

The most helpful thing when working on line for training, coaching, interviewing, or a general meeting is to be yourself, the same person you are when meeting in person. Connecting with others on line is more difficult because some of the context is lost, we are more easily distracted by everything that may be happening around us and within the meeting. Having an engaging facilitator of a meeting or training is probably the most helpful tip, on line requires more interaction to maintain their interest, so I try to limit sharing document screens to help maintain a connection with attendees. I prefer sharing documents ahead of time, then spend our time in the meeting in meaningful and purposeful discussion.

I have found that the right format is the one that makes it easiest for the participants to learn. Having a complex LMS system might just get in the way compared to just doing YouTube videos.

This requires you to know your audience. Too much multimedia, especially for adults, can be distracting and keep them from getting as much out of the course as possible. It does work well for courses that people generally would find boring (like compliance based trainings that everyone has to take)

I like the emphasis of using multimedia and interactivity for online training. But I also agree that knowing your audience is crucial – some individuals might find too much of it a bit distracting. It's all about finding the right balance. We can mix things up by getting everyone involved in discussions or sharing ideas through chats and breakout rooms. Tossing in some fun questions or short quizzes every now and then will keep everyone on their toes. By keeping things interesting and considering what our audience likes, we can make our online training topics / objectives engaging and memorable.

Adding personalization and humanization into your (assignment) feedback via conversation language used in audio or video responses where you can correlate experiences and add "voice" helps audience know that you are a human, you care and you are there to set them up for success.

The challenge of giving feedback online is the timeliness, especially in an asynchronous course. I see this as a great opportunity to integrate AI into online courses to provide just-in-time feedback to participants so those completing the content at 1am get the same feedback as those who do it when the facilitator is able to response right away.