Corporate training is growing at a rapid pace. Although it slowed down a bit during the global pandemic, research forecasts that the corporate training market will reach $487.3 billion by 2030.
However, despite companies investing huge amounts of money in employee training, the outcomes they achieve often leave much to be desired. One of the reasons why training results are not always favorable is that employees aren’t engaged in the process. They consider training as a tedious imposed task and refer to it in a disparaging manner.
Fortunately, there are some time-honored practices that can help improve training performance. One of them is creating engaging eLearning courses that employees actually enjoy. To design such a course, you’ll need two important things — a desire to create and a solid authoring tool, such as iSpring Suite.
iSpring Suite is a powerful eLearning solution that allows you to create professional courses with no coding or design skills. It is integrated into PowerPoint, so you can start working on the content in the familiar PPT environment right away.
Once you install iSpring Suite on your computer, it will appear as a new tab on the PowerPoint ribbon. You can leverage all of its tools, such as quizzes, screen recording, and role-plays, right from this toolbar.
Now that you have an idea of how it all works, see how to create engaging courses with iSpring Suite.
1. Get Started with PowerPoint Slides
Do you have legacy PPT presentations that you’d like to turn into online courses? If so, converting them into an online format will only take you a couple of minutes with iSpring Suite. Or you can build a course from scratch the same way you assemble slides in PowerPoint.
Would you like your course to look professional from the very beginning? Then take advantage of iSpring’s ready-made slide templates with cohesive design and color themes. Every template is developed by the industry’s best specialists, so you have all the elements you need to create an engaging course: a title slide, a table of contents, chapters, a timeline, and more. Just arrange these slides in the right order, add your text and images, and your course is ready to go.
2. Add Interactive Assessments
Remember school, when you carefully prepared for a class knowing that there will be a graded test waiting for you? In fact, tests have always been a motivator to study harder. When learners know that their knowledge will be assessed through a test, it sets a deadline for when content needs to be learned, and students try to comply with this.
With iSpring Suite, you can create online quizzes that will not only let you check your employees’ knowledge and give learners an idea of how well they’re grasping the material, but also engage them. The toolkit enables you to create quizzes with 14 types of questions, including drag-and-drops, in which a learner needs to sort or put items in the right place, and hotspots that require learners to mark a certain area of an image.
3. Record a Presenter Video
Are you going to cover a topic that you think will be difficult for your employees to learn by just reading slides? Then record a video with an expert who will explain it in detail. Besides, this video will add a personal touch to your training and be a great way to create a deeper connection with your learners.
With iSpring Suite, you can easily record webcam videos as well as screencasts and fine-tune them with a built-in video editor. You can remove unnecessary fragments, insert an intro slide at the beginning of the recording, and add images, infographics, and annotations to make a video more engaging and the information provided more memorable.
4. Create an Interactive Role-Play
Have you ever acted out scenarios during the training when, for example, one of the employees plays the role of an angry customer and another employee tries to come up with a solution to direct the conversation toward a harmonious conclusion? With iSpring Suite, you can convert this scenario into a virtual role-play and help employees master their communication skills in a risk-free environment without sabotaging a sale or your company’s reputation.
Role-plays might seem too complex to develop, but iSpring Suite does all the heavy lifting for you. You can build a dialogue tree in a visual editor and manipulate it with a single click.
To make the simulation even more realistic, you can add characters and locations — upload your own images or use the built-in assets. iSpring Suite provides access to a large set of backgrounds suitable for office scenarios, manufacturing, education, medicine, and other settings, and a wide range of characters of different ages, ethnic groups, and professions. The collection also includes hand-drawn locations and characters that can engage your learners in a role-play with even greater intensity.
5. Design an eLearning Interaction
Another way to increase your learners’ engagement is to let them interact more with the content. For example, you can repurpose your text content into interactions.
One of the coolest things about iSpring Suite is that you can create them in a matter of minutes. You just need to choose a relevant template, fill it with text and media, and the interaction is ready. The toolkit allows you to create 14 types of interactions, including glossaries, FAQs, timelines, catalogs, and label graphics.
In the example below, you can see the Steps interaction that provides a step-by-step guide on how to handle an angry customer. You can also use it for any other instruction.
6. Incorporate Your Brand Identity
Branding is more than simply addressing a company’s design requirements. It’s an effective way to ensure learners that your training isn’t generic content but is tailored to the needs and challenges of their work.
iSpring Suite makes customizing the look and feel of your course a breeze. You can redesign the player as you wish: customize colors, change the font and shape of buttons, add gradients and transparency, and more.
As you can see, creating an engaging course with iSpring Suite isn’t rocket science. Even a person with no tech background can accomplish this with ease. Would you like to see iSpring Suite in action and check all its capabilities out for yourself? Then get a 14-day free trial and create your first course today.
