From classroom to e-learning: where HR and L&D teams should start

Most companies we talk to start in the wrong place. They begin with a platform demo, or a quote for converting forty slide decks, and only later ask who will open those courses, on what, and when. Turn it around. The first month of going digital is mostly a spreadsheet.

Start with an audit, not a platform

List every training you run today. For each one, write down who takes it, how many people, how often, how long it takes in the room, and what goes wrong on the job when someone has missed it. A logistics company with a few warehouses usually finds the list is longer than anyone expected. A shipping company needs two lists, one for crew on board and one for staff ashore, because the two groups learn in completely different conditions.

Then add the column most audits forget: the device. Where does this person actually sit when they could learn? A planner in the office has a computer. A forklift driver has a phone and a twenty minute break. A deck cadet has a phone and, for days at a time, no signal. That column will decide more about your courses than any authoring tool.

In Vietnam the phone is the safe default. DataReportal counted 79.8 million internet users at the start of 2025, 78.8 percent of the population, and 127 million active mobile connections, more than one per person.¹ National figures do not tell you whether your forklift drivers have data left at the end of the month, though. Ask them. Ten conversations in the canteen are worth more than any market report.

Sort the list into three piles

Move first. Training that repeats often, is the same every time and mostly carries knowledge or decisions: induction, the safety rules of a site, document handling, customer procedures, product knowledge. This is where a trainer spends whole days saying the same thing, and where a short online lesson gives those days back.

Blend. Anything with a hands-on skill. The knowledge part goes online: the rules, the sequence, the checks and the reasons for them. The practice stays on the floor with a supervisor, and so does the practical sign-off. Lashing a container, driving a reach stacker, connecting a bunker hose: the learner arrives at the practical session already knowing the steps, so the instructor's time goes to the part only an instructor can do.

Leave alone, for now. Training that lives on discussion between people (leadership, negotiation, difficult conversations), training whose content changes every month, and anything regulated where an authority expects a set format. For seafarers, the STCW Convention lays down minimum standards of competence in detailed tables,² and approved courses come with their own rules on how competence is shown. Check with the flag State or the training institute before you swap any part of an approved course for your own e-learning.

What the research does and does not promise

The study people still quote is a meta-analysis for the US Department of Education. Across 51 comparisons, learners who took all or part of a course online did better on average than those taught face to face. The gap was bigger for blended courses (an effect size of +0.35) than for purely online ones (+0.14), and the authors are careful about why: the advantage "is not necessarily rooted in the media used per se and may reflect differences in content, pedagogy and learning time."³

That is the useful reading for an HR manager. Moving online does not make training better by itself. What helps is what a well made online course makes easy: practice spread over weeks, questions instead of slides, and more minutes actually spent on the material.

Two findings are worth knowing by name. Spacing: a review of 317 experiments found that spreading practice out improves what people still know later, and that the best gap between sessions grows with how long they need to remember.⁴ Testing: in Roediger and Karpicke's 2006 study, students who practised by recalling a text remembered substantially more on the delayed tests than students who read it again, even though rereading made them feel more confident.⁵

So when you convert a classroom course, do not move the slides. Move the questions.

Quick wins for the first three months

Pick one course, not a catalogue. The best first candidate is usually the induction. Everybody takes it, it comes back with every new hire, and the supervisors already know where it fails.

Cut it before you build it. Ask the expert what people must be able to do after the course, and keep only what serves that. Cathy Moore's action mapping is a sound method here: start from a measurable business goal, focus on what people do rather than what they know, and design realistic practice instead of information.⁶

Use what you already have. Your SOPs, photos of your own site and the questions supervisors ask every new starter are better raw material than any stock library.

Agree the measure up front. Pick a number you already track, such as errors on customs documents, near misses, or the weeks before a new hire works alone. Write it into the brief before anyone builds anything. Our free e-learning project brief has a box for it.

Budget honestly

An online course takes longer to make than a classroom session takes to prepare. In a 2010 survey of 249 organisations, Chapman Alliance found an average of 43 hours of development for each finished hour of classroom training, against 79 hours for the simplest e-learning and 184 for interactive e-learning.⁷ Good templates and an experienced team bring that down, and we rely on both on every project. They do not remove the expert's time. Whoever knows the job still has to read the script and sign it off, and that is usually where projects slip.

One last thing. Your first course is also a test of your rollout: who sends the link, when people may learn during a shift, who answers when a password is forgotten on night shift. We put those steps on one page in the rollout checklist.

Sources

1. Kepios / DataReportal (2025). Digital 2025: Vietnam. datareportal.com/reports/digital-2025-vietnam (opens in a new tab)
2. International Maritime Organization. International Convention on Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers (STCW), 1978. www.imo.org/en/ourwork/humanelement/pages/stcw-convention.aspx (opens in a new tab)
3. Means, B., Toyama, Y., Murphy, R., Bakia, M. and Jones, K. (2009). Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies. US Department of Education. files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED505824.pdf (opens in a new tab)
4. Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T. and Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: a review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin 132(3), 354 to 380. doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354 (opens in a new tab)
5. Roediger, H. L. and Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science 17(3), 249 to 255. doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x (opens in a new tab)
6. Moore, C. (2008). Action mapping: a visual approach to training design. blog.cathy-moore.com/action-mapping-a-visual-approach-to-training-design (opens in a new tab)
7. Chapman, B. (2010). How long does it take to create learning? Chapman Alliance. www.slideshare.net/slideshow/how-long-does-it-take-to-create-learning/5198860 (opens in a new tab)