eLearning Coaching: How to Diversify Your Coaching Sessions With an Authoring Tool

Nowadays, coach training sessions are still mostly conducted online due to the pandemic. While some people long to return to the pre-COVID reality, others are excited about the new opportunities that online training has brought to coaching in the past few years. A great thing about all this is that, even when training sessions get back offline, there’ll be lots of new training activities and tools inherited from online training – and the training experience will be a mixture of the best formats, methods, and approaches.

So, if you still haven’t implemented online training tools in your work, check out how they can diversify your training sessions and make them more effective.

Use Story-Based Training

Since ancient times, people have used stories to pass knowledge to future generations. Stories fascinate and entertain learners, thus making the learning process much more engaging. Many coaches already use storytelling in their training sessions. Yet, an authoring tool can take this method to the next level.

Let’s say you’re a sales coach. You’ve monitored data and concluded that the salespersons need to develop their communication skills. Typically, you would tell them success stories or share examples from your practice. While this might be inspiring and insightful, it doesn’t really help trainees with their skills. Now, imagine if your salespeople could relive your stories – if they could take your place, face the issues you faced, make their own decisions, and achieve outcomes based on their actions. An authoring tool makes this possible.

Let’s take iSpring Suite as an example. With this tool, you can create dialogue simulations quickly and easily. You can select from hundreds of characters of different ages, ethnicities, and professions, and thousands of locations, from warehouses and banks to hospitals and classrooms. You can add voice-overs and an emotion meter to make the simulation even more immersive. Unlike other tools, you don’t need any coding skills to develop story-based training sessions – the tool has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface that anyone can start using right away.

Provide Engaging Assessment

Knowledge checks are an essential part of training, not only because they show how well trainees acquire new information and skills, but also because they can help increase knowledge retention. Of course, this depends on what type of assessment you conduct. This means if you simply hand out black-and-white printouts with a list of, say, 10 questions on your topic, it will look like school or university tests that very few (if any) people find engaging. As a result, trainees may cheat or give stress-driven results — neither of which is productive for your training sessions.

Authoring tools, like iSpring Suite, allow you to build much more engaging online assessments with dozens of ready-made question types, from traditional multiple-choice and true/false questions to drag-and-drops and hotspots. Compare this “school-like” assessment on merchandising with the one created with an authoring tool. Which one will give you better training results?

Your task is to increase the sales of Lovely Morning butter. Where should you place it on the display? Upper shelfMiddle shelfLower shelf

Besides, trainees can take online assessments anytime, anywhere. And, unlike traditional tests, you won’t have to check all the results manually — just upload them to your eLearning platform and it will do all the routine work for you.

Create Video Modules

Video is one of the most beloved formats in online learning nowadays. Perhaps you already use it in your training programs by sharing links on YouTube videos or displaying them on a large screen to your audience, for instance. With an authoring tool, you can do more than that.

For example, with iSpring Suite, you can record videos in three formats:

• Screencast – you record only your screen (for software coaching.)
• Camera recording – you record only your camera.
• Picture-in-picture video – you record both your screen and camera (this can be used to create content for those with hearing impairments).

You can edit recordings in a built-in video studio: add annotations, cut out or trim parts of your video, add and edit audio, enhance the image with annotations, and select transition effects. If made correctly, a video can be an extremely effective training module in your session.

Collaborate With Your Trainees

Some authoring tools come with extra options. iSpring Suite comes with iSpring Space, an online platform where you and your team can work together in real time. For example, you can conduct a face-to-face session with your trainees and then take out your laptops, smartphones, and tablets, and create a related micro-course together to consolidate knowledge. Or you can divide trainees into several groups, and each of them will design their own course and send it to other groups. As a coach, you can see their progress, leave comments, detect issues, and more.

Needless to say, when trainees get an opportunity not only to be listeners but also creators and collaborators, such tasks can boost their engagement and the effectiveness of your training sessions.

Summing Up

An authoring tool can help you take your training sessions to the next level. With it, you can create training content that fascinates trainees and implement activities that engage them. Moreover, the right tools can make your work easier and faster while making your training courses more complex, rich, and professional-looking. If you feel that you would benefit from it in your coaching endeavors, test an authoring tool and see how it works in your case. Most vendors offer free trials.