Virtual training

5 Best Remote Training Tools for 2024

The CloudShare Team

Mar 18, 2024 - 4 min read

Remote employee training and blended learning are the new normal. While there’s still very much a place for in-person learning and development, people are increasingly embracing virtual learning. It’s not difficult to see why, either.

Not only are remote training methods more accessible than traditional in-person learning, but they also tend to be more cost-effective, particularly for businesses with widely distributed teams. Virtual training also tends to be much easier to scale than in-person training. Unlike a physical classroom, remote training environments have no hard limit on the number of participants they can support.

With the right tools, it’s also easier to support hands-on learning, ensure consistency between instructors and sessions, and track usage and progress. But what exactly constitutes an effective remote training solution? How do you know which platforms your business should evaluate and which it should overlook?

We’ve got you covered. We’re going to go over some of this year’s best tools for remote training, from communication and collaboration to virtual reality.

Our Top Remote Training Tools for 2024

Slack

As one of the most popular business messaging and workplace collaboration apps on the market, Slack also provides an excellent way to support collaborative learning. Businesses can assign roles to training participants that grant access to exclusive channels where they can connect both with one another and with instructors. This not only allows them to discuss training between sessions but also to connect with one another during training. After all, training participants can communicate with one another and stay up-to-date on scheduled sessions.

For self-paced training, instructors can receive assistance request notifications directly through Slack, ensuring a faster and more effective response — something which can be particularly valuable during onboarding.

Slack’s other collaboration features can also be valuable for learning and development. The platform supports audio and video calls with up to 50 participants on paid plans, as well as screen sharing and file sharing. It’s an excellent compliment to any existing training tools your organization might be using and a powerful solution for workplace productivity and communication outside of training, as well.

Slides With Friends

Slides With Friends is all about interactivity, allowing instructors to enrich static slides with features like word clouds, quizzes and live polls. The platform is also incredibly easy for instructors to use. The process of creating a training session through Slides With Friends is more or less identical to what’s involved in creating a regular slide deck.

The platform’s interactive slideshows also support hybrid learning. Instructors can display a session as a presentation via a projector or screen sharing, at which point participants can join on their PCs, laptops, or mobile devices. What’s more, joining a session is as simple as clicking on an invite URL or scanning a QR code — there’s no need to create an account or go through a prolonged registration process.

Just click, join, interact, and learn.

NetExam LMS

Discussions of corporate learning and development often focus more or less exclusively on employees and occasionally contractors. Channel partners are frequently left out of the equation. That’s a mistake — a thriving partner ecosystem can be one of the most powerful revenue growth tools in a software company’s arsenal.

NetExam was developed with this in mind. A powerful customer training and channel partner training learning management system, NetExam offers an absolutely massive feature set, including support for gamified learning, certification programs, social learning, and microlearning. Arguably, the most compelling thing about the platform, however, is how it uses artificial intelligence.

The Netexam.ai module can assist with everything from course creation and exam generation to reporting and analytics. This includes AI-generated simulations, a personalized AI tutor, and AI-driven learning impact analyses.

Last but certainly not least, NetExam integrates seamlessly with multiple other software platforms, including SalesForce and CloudShare.

Apty

Branding itself as one of the top digital adoption platforms on the market, Apty’s claim to fame is its robust code-free course editor. It’s a powerful tool in any instructor’s arsenal, particularly with its intuitive course management functionality. Apty also provides on-demand on-screen guidance, providing learners with step-by-step instructions without requiring direct intervention from a trainer.

The on-screen guidance functionality is driven by a powerful behavioral algorithm and supported by robust analytics data that provides deep insights into both how employees are engaging with training materials and where they appear to be struggling.

VISIONxR

Alongside artificial intelligence, virtual reality may well be one of the most compelling innovations of the past decade. While the technology itself has been around for quite some time, the notion of using it for training and onboarding — or rather, the capacity to do so in the first place — is a relatively recent development.

Imagine being able to bring your entire team together into a dedicated digital space where they can directly interact and train with one another as though they were face-to-face. It sounds almost like something out of science fiction, but it’s very real. VISIONxR allows your organization to fully embrace immersive training, creating dedicated and fully customizable virtual classrooms that can be customized with everything from computer hardware to complex machinery.

While this may be overkill for software training, its applications in fields such as aerospace and manufacturing are incredibly compelling.

CloudShare

A few years ago, we asserted that remote training is the future. That’s no longer the case. Alongside blended learning, remote training is now standard practice. Particularly if you’re a software company, this is no longer a trend you can afford to ignore — if ever you could.

Instead, you need to embrace virtual training and adopt the right tools and solutions to support both customer education and corporate learning and development. That’s where CloudShare comes in. Our powerful, intuitive virtual IT labs allow you to effortlessly create high-impact virtual training and demos for everything from customer onboarding to employee upskilling.

CloudShare also directly integrates with several of the tools detailed above, including Slack and NetExam, with a powerful API to support custom integrations with virtually any remote training tool your organization uses. In short, it’s an excellent foundation for your remote training strategy — book a demo today, and we’ll show you firsthand.

In the meantime, if you want to know more about what goes into a successful remote training program, check out 10 Tips to Plan and Execute Remote Employee Training.