How to turn face-to-face sessions into successful online courses

There are many excellent reasons for offering courses online as well as face-to-face. If you want to convert your existing face-to-face training into online courses, all you have to do is follow a few simple rules. The good thing is that you have already prepared all the course content, and this “only” has to be adapted for another medium. And you will have based your content on a thorough analysis of who the course is suitable for, what its aims are, and the precise make-up of the target group. If you want to offer your face-to-face courses online, you will have to make sure you take account of the particular educational and technical requirements of eLearning. This article provides step-by-step instructions on what special requirements you need to consider, and how to turn face-to-face sessions into an inspiring and successful online course.

First of all, you should analyze whether the content of the face-to-face training is suited to being delivered online. Not all content can be presented digitally. In particular, if training involves a combination of theory and practical experience, it may be useful to digitalize only parts of the course and deliver them in a blended learning environment. So you will need to look at your content section by section. Please note: Practical content can be digitalized, and special features are available to help with this. However, participants have to try out activities such as experiments, procedures, and exercises themselves, of course, in order to learn from them.

If your current face-to-face sessions can be presented as an online course, the process of converting your content is very similar to what an eLearning author would do when creating a purely online course from scratch. You have one major advantage, however: The basic research and analysis work has already been done. But you should still double check that you have covered the following research and analysis issues before you start creating the online course itself:

Even if you have already set your learning objectives for your face-to-face sessions, it may be helpful to restate them clearly when creating the online course. What should learners know or be able to do after completing the course? Answering this question precisely will help you decide what content to include and whether you need to add additional content.

A learning objective might be formulated like this, for example:

—“Course participants should be able to create and schedule tasks for themselves and other team members in the new project management software, enter progress with work, assign files to projects, and archive completed projects.”

This objective can then be used to develop specific course content and to evaluate learning outcomes. Alternatively, if it were to be formulated as 

“Employees should be able to handle the new project management software”, 

you would probably find it more difficult to decide which content would be really relevant for the basic software course. It would also not be possible to evaluate the success of the course with any clarity afterwards.

While you were familiar with the previous learning environment, digitalization is now changing things:

• Where are participants doing their learning?
• What devices are they using?
• And do they already have devices or will these need to be provided?

If, for example, the participants are primarily studying as they travel to work, it would be better to offer individual lessons in short nuggets. The devices used by learners will also determine how you present content. Here, it is beneficial to work with software that can offer a fully responsive version of online courses from the outset.

You will have based your face-to-face sessions on a scheme of work. However, digitalization requires a broader scheme that takes account of eLearning specifications. Please note the following four recommendations:

To enable you to reuse individual modules in other online courses, you must create them as separate sections (sharable content objects) in the authoring tool. The smaller the modules, the more easily you will be able to recycle them later. To do this, you simply transfer the table of contents of your face-to-face training into a section. It’s important to refine your structure and check that you have learning objectives for each section and subsection.

In contrast to face-to-face sessions, online courses give you and your participants the opportunity to review knowledge and identify any gaps in a timely manner during the course. Specifying the learning path, will enable you to decide how to evaluate each section. Do learners have to complete a section successfully before they can unlock others, or can subsections be completed independently of one another? And which sections also require learners to pass a test in order to complete them successfully?

Professional authoring tools offer a wide range of interactive features, media, and gamification tools. Select these to suit your learning objective, target groups, and learning environment. Then decide which media are most likely to help learners achieve your learning objective and which are best suited to your participants. The benefit of incorporating a variety of elements is that you can appeal to different learner types.