Design your asynchronous online training in three steps

If you have chosen to put your training online, it’s probably because you have analyzed the needs of your students. They can be far away (geographically), busy because of personal or professional obligations and therefore, unable to attend a traditional classroom setting. The answer is quite obvious, your training will be on an online platform and available 24/7. This is where we will talk about an asynchronous training, in other words, a training where the teacher and the student do not need to be connected at the same time.

But now, how are you going to organize your content? How can you guide your students to reach the educational objectives in your asynchronous online training setting?

Specialists talk about scenarios, granularization and modular structure. You will also get to play around different concepts to transform your knowledge and expertise into organized learning content within an interesting training.

Step 1

First of all, as previously mentioned in our article Defining your objectives and training structure, define and write your main educational objective. Put all of the material you may deem important (texts, images, videos, PowerPoint presentations, links, etc.) into a folder on your computer. Are you sure you have everything? I know you must have something interesting hidden in one of your old briefcases or in a folder at the bottom of your drawer. Take this time to scan any documents you only have on paper (you will thank me later). This first step will help you think about the necessary educational resources you will need to write and/or acquire later on.

Step 2

At this point, you will need to organize your folder into units. A first layout of your training should appear quickly in your head (your training should be in four, twelve or twenty distinctive parts). Yes, but you are not certain about the number of units and it’s completely normal at this time. The final number of units can still change, so let’s see how we can improve your structure.

It’s here that the specific educational objectives you are going to write for each unit will apply. Let’s take a Home Fire Safety training and its “Electric Risks” unit as an example. The educational objective could be: “At the end of this unit, the student will be able to locate the electrical panel at home and activate or deactivate the fuses.”

Step 3

You see that your previous structure has changed and grown, some units have probably disappeared and some were replaced by new ones. It’s a good sign! Your structure will be quite solid. Now you can create it on the platform that will host your training.

This three-step program will allow you to find and express your main educational objective, to collect all the documents you needed and to structure your training into units with clear and specific goals. Congratulations! You now have your scenario and you are finally ready to work on the content of your units, but let’s keep that under wraps until our next article. So stay tuned!