10 Ways to Make Virtual Training Sessions Engaging and Effective

By: Karen Spencer, Area Vice President, OrasiLabs Product Manager

With their innate features and capabilities, virtual labs can increase the speed, scale, and effectiveness of your hands-on application training. You can level up your virtual training with the knowledge that top players in the industry provide. And once you embrace the power of virtual labs to accelerate and augment your training outcomes, here are ten ways to optimize their effectiveness.

1. Deepen and strengthen your course design: Instructors and course designers can expand the trainees’ understanding of product features by providing easy-to-access training environments that a robust virtual lab platform offers. Utilize re-usable templates to streamline the creation of hands-on learning environments and save valuable time.

2. Design for the individual: Not every trainee or team has the same training needs. Every learning situation, therefore, is unique. Virtual labs allow you to quickly adapt your course content for the desired audience.

3. Collaboration is key: An effective training session allows instructors, and learners, to be on the same page. No distance – geographical or cognitive – stands between these two entities in a virtual lab. The lab gives adequate scope for learners to collaborate, interact, and learn in a collaborative, flexible environment.

4. Hands-on learning: Hands-on elements in a virtual lab enables learners to not only learn the concept, but see it, try it, and apply it in real-word scenarios on the spot. This provides greater engagement and understanding of the application.

5. Empower the trainee: Virtual labs allow for flexible, self-paced environments that allow trainees to learn at their own time, place, and pace. Since virtual labs can easily be reset, trainees are free to explore ideas without the fear of breaking something. This shows to improve engagement, which leads to improved knowledge retention.

6. Scale-out and scale-up: Many tools in a virtual lab platform will give you the option to scale in horizontal and vertical ways. You can offer multiple training sessions to diverse audiences with different content simultaneously, increasing your ability to offer additional training.

7. Supervise without intrusion: The over-the-shoulder view of virtual labs enables the instructor to quickly provide assistance and take control of student machines, as necessary.

8. Keep an eye on costs: Take advantage of cost control measures that a modern virtual lab platform provides. Automatically pause and stop unused resources and get email notifications when resources are left unattended.

9. Reduce IT burden: Use configurable policies, on-demand, and reusable environments while liberating yourself from impractical hardware and software demands.

 10. The power of the cloud without the complexity: Organizations can take advantage of the security, scalability, and performance of major cloud providers while using an interface specifically built for training teams. Complex application environments can be built via a drag/drop interface and classes can be scheduled via an intuitive wizard.

As you can see, choosing a virtual lab helps you expand your product’s reach and adoption in the most comprehensive and profound way. This is not only about saving costs or reducing the physical constraints of a training event, but also about closing the knowledge gap between instructors and learners in a big way.

So, embrace virtual labs, accelerate your training, and optimize engagement to get better results!