10 Interactive Training Ideas to Engage Your Teams

In this article, we’ll help you discover some interactive training ideas to make your training more engaging for learners. These interactive training ideas will help you ensure that information is well-retained and understood. Check out our list below.

What is interactive training?

Interactive training is a more personalized and dynamic approach to learning that encourages participants to get involved rather than passively receive information. With this training style, learners can engage through activities like hands-on exercises, interactive simulations, group discussions, quizzes, and games.

Why is interactive training important?

Unlike passive learning methods that usually include just reading, listening, or watching, interactive training allows learners to apply newly learned skills in a more memorable way. This transforms them from mere recipients of learning content into active practitioners.

The importance of interactive training stems from several key benefits:

• Better knowledge retention: Active participation directly correlates with improved memory recall. When learners interact with content and apply concepts, they form stronger cognitive connections, making it easier to remember information.

• Increased engagement and motivation: By incorporating fun activities for training sessions like discussions, role-playing, and hands-on exercises, interactive training keeps learners actively involved and interested. This facilitates a deeper understanding of the training content.

• Easier development of practical skills: Many subjects, especially in professional contexts, require more than just theoretical knowledge; they demand practical application. Interactive training gives workers the opportunity to practice new skills in a safe and controlled environment.

• Immediate feedback: Interactive training sessions often allow for real-time feedback. Learners get to understand what they've done correctly and where they need to improve right away.

1. Apply interactive microlearning strategy

Microlearning is an interactive training idea that will help you improve the format and delivery of your lessons. This strategy transforms extensive modules into bite-sized lessons that focus only on key messages. In common self-paced eLearning courses, information is presented through overwhelmingly long modules.

But when you apply a micro learning strategy, learners can absorb information much better and prevent cognitive overload. With its compact nature, microlearning courses can be completed in just a couple of minutes, unlike traditional courses that take hours or days to complete. Overall, a microlearning approach makes your training easier to understand, more engaging, and less time-consuming.

Hard-skill courses like CNC training courses and emergency evacuation training courses can also be delivered in a microlearning format to help learners digest information more easily. To make your microlessons more interactive, even without coding or designing experience, you can take advantage of training software that provides readily available interactive templates.

Mitti (by SafetyCulture) is an award-winning cloud-based learning management system (LMS) that allows you to create your own microlessons with its user-friendly authoring tool that includes 80+ interactive templates. Trainers can create an engaging learning environment with this learning technology, may it be fully online or with blended learning.

You don’t always have to start from scratch, though – you can readily deploy available microlearning instructional courses from its free, editable course library. Here you’ll discover courses about corporate compliance, leadership development, food safety, and more. You can also find helpful EMR training courses, EHS training courses, and HIPAA training courses in Mitti’s free, editable course library.

Take your instructional design project to the next level with Mitti (by SafetyCulture)!

2. Make training fun with gamification

One way to make training fun and interactive is to use gamification. This interactive training idea is the method of transforming regular training modules into casual or competitive games by incorporating game elements into the lessons. Research suggests that the use of play elements in a formal environment, such as work, can significantly boost employees’ engagement and interest.

Gamification examples come in different forms, such as simulations, competitions, prizes, and many more. It’s an effective way to combat the lack of motivation and boredom associated with learning work-related information. When learning doesn’t feel like another mundane task, gamified microlessons are proven to result in 90% (or higher) completion rates compared to typical eLearning courses.

With Mitti's learning software, game design elements and principles, such as leaderboards, rewards, and scoring, can be used in your course content to increase learner engagement. Its free template library also includes interactive games, such as a letter jumble game, jeopardy game, and memory game. These gamification templates are ideal for teaching and reinforcing key concepts.

3. Incorporate social learning through discussions

Social learning is an interactive training idea that promotes collaboration among employees in learning certain topics. This strategy allows learners to share knowledge, expertise, and experiences within your organization. You can adopt tools and platforms where your employees can discuss their training lessons. This way, they can help one another to improve their performance at work. It also enables your learners to share insights from significant experiences in the workplace that will make work processes more efficient for everyone in the team.

Mitti (by SafetyCulture) leverages the power of social learning through its premium Discussions in-lesson tool. This is a forum-style feature designed to give the opportunity for learners the opportunity to lead course discussions when necessary, and provide real-time feedback to peers. Coaches can even step in to provide insight into key responses.

4. Create interactive reinforcement with assignments

Interactive reinforcement involves asking a question about information previously covered in the lesson. It reinforces the lesson’s content by forcing learners to recall and revisit what they’ve been previously taught, especially for difficult concepts. A method to create interactive reinforcement is by deploying assignments. It allows you to reinforce information, identify knowledge gaps, and evaluate your team’s understanding of course materials. This way, you can highlight their strengths or areas of improvement when providing feedback.

Mitti’s Assignments is a question-and-answer feature that enables you to assign a self-test to reinforce key concepts and assess knowledge retention. It allows your learners to provide detailed responses to your targeted questions through image, video, or long-form text submissions. Submitted responses can then be easily reviewed and graded by admins/instructors.

5. Immerse learners in training through virtual training simulations

One of the best interactive training examples is a simulation. A virtual training simulation is an immersive and interactive training method of engaging learners in virtual activities that are typically demonstrated through in-person demos.

Learners are more likely to increase their retention and improve their skills if they can apply their knowledge and skills in simulations before entering real-world situations. They can be exercised through augmented reality-based simulations through training software like V360E.

This platform enables you to create a VR-based training program by adding a 360 panoramic photo or video, audio elements, and additional text to enhance learning. You can also use it to implement disaster preparedness programs like emergency evacuation training courses, EMR development training courses, and health care courses, as these require a lot of skill and practice.

While using software like V360E is ideal for creating virtual-reality-based training, it can cost a lot of money. For a more cost-efficient approach, you can leverage accessible video conferencing platforms to create an interactive and immersive experience for learners.

6. Use spaced repetition for interactive knowledge reinforcement

Spaced repetition is a technique where key learning concepts are repeated at regular intervals until knowledge is fully embedded in the long-term memory of your employees. Applying this learning strategy to your training program helps your learners combat the forgetting curve, promote better learning outcomes, and foster knowledge competency. According to the Forgetting Curve by Ebbinghaus, nearly 50% of the content of a piece of lengthy information is simply forgotten within the first hour, while 70% of those data points are lost within 24 hours of training completion. It amplifies the importance of a spaced repetition strategy. Memory and learning go hand in hand – the more frequently and effectively information is reinforced, the more learners absorb knowledge.

To help you enhance spaced repetition strategy in your mobile learning, a system-automated quiz called Brain Boost is offered in Mitti’s learner experience (by request only). This feature automatically pulls questions from your lessons and creates personalized quizzes for each learner to test which information they’ve retained. The more answers they get right, the less frequently they are tested on a particular lesson.

7. Let learners earn achievements in their learning progress

To keep employees engaged and motivated, you can let your learners earn certificates, incentives, or badges for their learning progress. This is an interactive training idea that gives learners the opportunity to further step up in their training and beat their own progress. It also serves as a way of recognizing employees for their time, effort, and hard work in completing their online courses.

With that, Mitti (by SafetyCulture) developed an Achievements feature that allows you to congratulate, motivate, and inspire learners with banners and badges for every learning progress. You’re also given the option to export each learner’s Achievements to internally shout out top achievers and learners’ milestones. This creates intrinsic motivation for learners, as well as an internal buzz between employees, leading to higher engagement and better learning behaviors.

8. Implement mentorship programs

Implementing mentorship programs allows your learners to interact closely and learn from their seniors or colleagues. Mentoring programs typically have two core benefits: help new hires quickly absorb and understand the organization’s culture, policies, and processes, as well as support non-performing employees to excel further and become the best version of themselves.

The learning process is simple—mentors will share their knowledge and experience with their mentees and closely supervise them until they can function well on their own. But, it’s not just the mentees who will benefit. It’s a win-win solution since your mentors will also develop their leadership and communication skills along the way.

While most employees are accustomed to having their managers and supervisors as their mentors, senior and excelling employees can also play the role. Members from different departments can also participate and mentor each other about the inner operations of your company. Learning how the different parts of the organization function may open up opportunities for your employees to develop a whole new set of knowledge and skills that they can use to improve their daily performance.

9. Use interactive digital whiteboards

An interactive digital whiteboard is a collaborative learning platform that allows multiple participants to manipulate the screen in real-time. It serves as a simulation for taking notes on the board in face-to-face sessions. This allows the learners to actively collaborate on different training topics, whether in silence or while brainstorming virtually. By using this tool, you can elevate the learning experience of your visual learners.

Through platforms like Miro, Google Jamboard and Explain Everything, you can create dynamic visual lectures, animated illustrations, and even games to engage learners with your training content. Individual whiteboards can also be enabled for learners so they can answer questions and activities in real-time.

Employees can also express their insights through a wide array of media, such as text, drawings, GIFs, animations, and images. It also boosts collaborative learning as everyone can pitch in their ideas all at the same time, which is perfect for remote brainstorming sessions during the ideas training.

10. Include breakout sessions

Breakout sessions make live virtual training sessions interactive. It’s a good opportunity for learners to discuss their insights amongst themselves about a specific topic or lesson. This activity encourages participation and collaboration that will help them in their work life. Communication is also tested here since everyone is given a chance to voice their thoughts. This can break barriers when the participants first join through fun learning activities.

There are many online meeting platforms that feature breakout rooms, allowing facilitators to divide large groups of participants into smaller groups for collaborative discussions. This way, learners can participate more actively in discussions within their breakout groups. Their insights can then be shared back within the large group again after the breakout sessions.

Bring these ideas to life and create training that your learners will enjoy. Try Mitti (by SafetyCulture) today!