Web platform for professional training

26 March 2025. Published by Benoît Labourdette.

5 min

Following the democratization of remote work, it has been necessary to rethink approaches to professional training. This proven method offers a powerful alternative to in-person training. Structured in short, thematic sessions, it fosters the co-construction of knowledge through an online contribution space where each participant shares summaries, controversies, and enrichments.

Rethinking Interaction Dynamics

From the Covid period onward, remote work has truly become mainstream. The meaning of remote work must be considered in complementarity with in-person work. Take the example of professional training. We know that people who come together learn partly from what is transmitted to them but also learn a lot from what they experience together and from the moments of interaction among themselves and with others, such as during visits or trips, for example. Thus, the informal aspect of professional training is very important. Even just through the bonding between trainees and the sharing of mutual interests, knowledge is built at the heart of human and professional relationships. This anchors knowledge in the reality of the individual, not just in a memory disconnected from the different layers of reality.

So, to design a remote professional training program, I experimented with new methods. How to avoid making remote training a mere substitute for in-person training, but instead explore what else can be done and invest in other spaces where different pedagogical potentials can be discovered.

I developed, for the training « Culture, Youth, and Digital » organized by the Observatoire des Politiques Culturelles, entirely remote, a pedagogical framework based on a proven digital platform that I share here.

First Point: Time in Remote Settings

A full day of training, alone in front of a screen, even if others are also present in front of theirs, is particularly arid and severely hampers concentration. Thus, for this training, I divided the day into six one-hour blocks, with schedules strictly adhered to, 15-minute breaks between each block, and a lunch break, of course.

Each time block is tied to a specific topic. So, in how the trainees project themselves, this training is no longer perceived as one long tunnel but as a series of one-hour moments, each focused on a precise subject. During in-person training, I never structure things so rigidly. On the contrary, I use a very flexible framework that can evolve throughout the day. But in remote settings, given the rigidity of each participant’s position behind their screen, this must be taken into account. Something that would be very flexible and evolving would feel constraining to participants and paradoxically demotivate them. Whereas with this one-hour block structure, one can focus on something specific for an hour alone in front of their screen. Participants need to be able to project themselves into it, which is why it must be specified and announced in advance. It’s about autonomy, which, in this remote setup, is built in a completely different way compared to in-person training.

The Informal in Remote Settings: A Challenge to Address

The other point, that of the informal, which I mentioned earlier, seems extremely important to me. In remote training, the informal simply does not exist. Participants are each in front of their screen, and that’s it. Once the training session is over, there is no informal space, no coffee break discussions, no joint visits to a site, no unexpected things that happen when at a restaurant, etc.

And yet, this informal space is essential for anchoring the training’s content in the reality of the participants. So, how can we ensure that, through other means, the content is embedded in the unique realities of each individual and in the connections between them? This is where I introduced a pedagogical logic based on a digital contribution tool, which allows me to create these spaces of connection in a completely different but surprisingly powerful and constructive way, beyond what I initially anticipated.

The Pedagogical Framework: Co-Construction of Knowledge

The principle is the same in each themed hour and is as follows:

The trainer shares their knowledge, or rather their lines of thought, approach, and references on the specific topic addressed during that hour. This is a 20-minute sequence. It forces synthesis. In how the sequence is presented, several elements are very important. First, the quality of the microphone is absolutely crucial. A specific microphone is needed so that the sound is very pleasant to listen to, especially since it will last the whole day. And above all, the quality and interactivity of visuals. Personally, I don’t use PowerPoint at all, as I find it too formulaic, but I use a document camera, or visualizer, that films what I have in front of me. This allows me to show books, take handwritten notes on paper, and perform manipulations. I switch from the main camera on my face to the camera showing documents. This embodiment of the 20-minute moment is truly co-constructed, as it is not based on pre-established documents but on notes taken in response to what is being said.
–* Then, for 15 minutes after this presentation, there is an oral exchange among the training participants. In the example I’m drawing from, there were 16 people, so not everyone could fully express themselves, but this is compensated for immediately afterward. Around the topic, during the oral exchange, the trainer notes everything said in a mind map, giving value to the participants’ input, which becomes a reference for further work. Thus, a trace of the oral exchanges is preserved based on what was said.
Then, participants are invited to connect to an online publication space specifically designed for the training, where there is a section corresponding to the theme just discussed. In this section, they can easily write their contributions on the topic. The instructions are very precise.
Of course, the training began with familiarization with the tool, which is very simple to use and can be mastered in five minutes.

Participant Contributions: Summaries, Disagreements, and Enrichments

This 20-minute personal writing sequence unfolds as follows:

First, each person writes a summary of what they took away from the topic. Each person’s summary is different. One might think that a summary is universal and that everyone would produce the same one. This is absolutely not the case. Each person creates their own summary, and having all these summaries is extremely enriching because it provides multiple perspectives on the topic.
Second, participants can express and write their disagreement with the stance taken by the trainer during the presentation. Of course, this must be argued, but there is room for disagreement, for controversy, which is the foundation of democracy and very important to implement in training, including remote professional training.
Third element: Some participants may have knowledge, sometimes even greater than the trainer’s, on the topic just discussed, and thus they can contribute with information or references to enrich the subject.

They also must associate tags with each of the articles they publish, which they can create. Pre-existing tags are visible, and if something is missing, new tags can be created and made available to everyone. This enables transversal navigation between the content.

The Richness of Contributions and Collective Intelligence

The first time I proposed this, during the first 15 minutes of the day, I was extremely impressed by the quantity but especially the quality of the content produced by these 16 people in parallel. Twenty minutes later, there was absolutely fascinating information on the topic, contributing to the richness and depth of understanding to an extent I had never seen in traditional in-person training, even with collective intelligence methods.

Thus, in this three-day training, with 18 such one-hour moments, it produced—and you have the example of one of the trainings at the end of this text—an enormous amount of content, references, and controversies, so rich that one could even consider editing a publication from it, as it is structured, hierarchical, and very easy to transfer to other publishing systems beyond web publication.

Conclusion: A Different Way of Training

So, this is something different from in-person training. I’m not making a value judgment between the two, but the creation of connections, deepening of understanding, structuring of thought, and the production of a significant and fascinating reference on the topic are unparalleled compared to what can be achieved in in-person training, precisely because each person is behind their screen and in a writing capacity that is tied to their posture in front of it.

Moreover, the video recording of each 20-minute presentation at the beginning is uploaded to the platform the same evening, so, as you can see, it brings together both the knowledge shared by the trainer and the participants’ contributions, summaries, and controversies.

You can also navigate through each participant’s thoughts afterward, creating a truly enormous mutual enrichment. Collective intelligence is accessible here. Each participant in this training has their intelligence and perspective on the topic, and this is enriching because it is their viewpoint, allowing us to see things differently. So, we also learn by looking at the same topic from multiple perspectives, and we can navigate thematically, through tags, and hierarchically, by following the program of the training days.

I was the first to be surprised by the power of this framework, and it taught me and gave me ideas for evolving my in-person training as well. So, I redesigned in-person frameworks based on what was developed in remote training.