Escape rooms (sometimes called breakout rooms) have surged in popularity over the past few years. These problem-solving, team-building activities offer a unique blend of riddles, gameplay, and teamwork that captivates participants. Traditionally a physical escape room experience, we’re now witnessing a huge surge in popularity of the online escape room variant. These allow for remote teams to engage in these captivating puzzles.

However, versatile escape rooms that are designed so that they be used either in teams, OR as a solo participant, are a great way to build gamification and a sense of time pressure into any course or training.

Enter ThingLink’s Scenario Builder, an easy-to-use tool for designing branched learning scenarios. We have now created 4 new scenario templates, which make it even easier to create online training from scratch. One of these is the Escape Room format. So if you’ve ever fancied creating your own virtual escape room, this tutorial is for you!

Why Virtual Escape Rooms?

Recently, social media has been abuzz with virtual team-building activities. The physical escape room transformed into the virtual escape room, combining the allure of video games with the social aspects of traditional escape games. These digital variants maintain the core essence: problem-solving skills, riddles, and team collaboration, often conducted over Zoom or similar video conferencing platforms. To explain the concept simply, the “escapee” has to answer questions correctly in order to proceed, and ultimately escape. Take a look at this example below which shows how the escape room principle works in action when built in ThingLink Scenario Builder.

New to ThingLink? Here’s a quick guide to creating your first interactive scene

How to create an Escape Room in the main ThingLink Editor

In the popular blog How to Make a Virtual Escape Room, we showed you how easy it is to make a ThingLink escape room using just a few 360 scenes and the handy transit tag.

Using Scenario Builder gives you an alternative format and functionality, which is particularly suited to anyone creating an escape room for learning and training content. With Scenario Builder you can easily track the route and progress that your learners took and which choices they made or answers they gave at each decision point.

Getting Started with ThingLink’s Scenario Builder

We have designed four main types of Scenario Builder templates: Linear, Escape room, Simulation Scenario and Self-Exploratory. They all work in slightly different ways. To learn about them all, see our blog ThingLink Scenario Builder Templates for Effective Employee Training.

The Escape Room template has been designed so that anyone can create their first Virtual Escape Room from scratch without any need to work out which elements go where! Simply follow our template and you will have a challenging puzzle for friends, family or colleagues to play. Swap out our dummy scenes for your own ThingLink scenes and edit the questions to suit your theme.

Your final escape room will behave something like this example below, with questions which have to be answered to move to each new section or scene.

How to use the Scenario Builder escape room template

To find and use the template, follow these simple steps.

• Log into your ThingLink account

• Go to Scenarios in the sidebar

• Choose the Create Scenario button

• Type in the name of your new scenario

• When Let’s Get Started screen appears, choose the Escape Room template

• Simply replace our dummy content with your own text, questions, branching and media! 

Going further with your Scenario Builder Escape Room

1. Choose a Theme: From Harry Potter to murder mystery, your escape room’s theme is its heart. This determines the questions, any riddles or trivia, and overall feel of the game.
2. Incorporate Gameplay Elements: Gamification elements like countdown timers and scores can be integrated. Only the correct answer should allow progression to the next stage.
3. Include a Tutorial: New players? Include a quick guide explaining how the game works. This can be a simple FAQs section covering game mechanics.
4. Interactivity is Key: Make use of ThingLink’s interactive features. This can mean clickable clues, embedded video snippets, or other gamified elements Embedding video from platforms like YouTube or Vimeo can enhance this. For instance, a clue might require players to watch a specific YouTube video with questions later in the scenario!
5. Escape Room Ideas & Variants: Beyond traditional riddles, you can design escape room games like scavenger hunts. The more creative you get, the better!
6. Team Collaboration: Encourage teamwork. For example, split a virtual team into groups, each working on different clues. They can discuss their findings before attempting each “escape”.
7. Feedback: Once players finish the escape game, you could embed a Google Form for feedback. This helps in refining gameplay, fixing any issues, and understanding player preferences.
8. Adjust Difficulty: Not all players are escape room veterans. Offering difficulty levels, or including a hint system, can make your digital escape room more accessible.

Extra Tips for an Engaging Virtual Escape Room

• Reusability: Maybe you’ve created a ‘murder mystery’ template, which can be adjusted slightly for a different storyline, saving time and effort.
• Incorporate Popular Culture: From movies or TV shows to famous video games, popular culture themes can attract a wider audience and a framework of reference.

Let’s go!

ThingLink’s Scenario Builder has made the creation of interactive experiences super easy. With this escape room Scenario Builder template, crafting your virtual escape room is now easier than ever, blending problem solving, teamwork, and the allure of escape room games into one digital package. The key is creativity, ensuring a balance between challenge and fun.

In this era, where remote team activities are the new norm, your ThingLink virtual escape room can be a fantastic bridge, connecting people in an engaging, gamified environment. Dive into ThingLink today and let the adventures begin!

Get inspired

For more inspiration and user-generated examples, why not join our groups and communities on social media?

• LinkedIn Community
• X / Twitter Creative Learning Design Community
• ThingLink Education Facebook Group

Step aboard to learn more!

Background to the project

Dwitney is an educator who specialises in the creation of escape room games, digital scavenger hunts, murder mystery and team building games. Her company Urban Escapade hosts the experiences for groups of friends and colleagues, but she is also an online educator on the worldwide home education platform Outschool. Dwitney holds a Bachelor of Honours in History and Development Studies, an M.A. in Public History, and an M.A. in Globalization Studies. With this background in history and a love of all things historical, many of her games and experiences feature a historical setting.

Dwitney started teaching via Outschool shortly before the pandemic, when very few people were offering online escape rooms. She saw an example of a ThingLink escape room on Teachers Pay Teachers, themed around on Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, and realised it had everything her team needed.

Dwitney’s OutSchool classes that she then launched using ThingLink were doing so well, that she launched her online game business full time, creating content using ThingLink.

“When we did ThingLink for the first time it just took off! I had done collaborations with colleges and universities and corporate events, creating team building games and murder mystery events and that kind of thing using it. So just grew and grew. Over the course of the pandemic we created 15 to 16 different projects.”

Dwitney Bethel, Urban Escapade

How this escape room was created

Dwitney had an initial concept of an escape room based on the Titanic, having recently watched a documentary about the ship. She realized that the ship would work well as the location of an escape room experience given the different areas that the users could move through – the deck, first, second and third class and so on. She was keen to create a new approach to exploring the ship and the events leading up to the sinking for students who would have seen the Titanic movie, as well as multiple CGI reproductions of the ship.

A history mystery escape room

Creating a “history mystery” seemed like a great way to allow students to explore the content with fresh eyes and in a more interactive and nuanced way. At all times Dwitney and her team have kept as faithful as possible to the design of the period and reflect in each “class” of the ship the realistic items that might have appeared there.

The escape room has weaved together historical fact with a fictional storyline that is engaging and exciting, as Dwitney puts it “a thin line of fact and fiction, which doesn’t go too much outside of the realm of possibility.” Dwitney’s team introduced a fictional “saboteur” character – which avoided the potential difficulty of the students having to assign blame for the tragedy on one of the real individuals involved. It was also very important to Dwitney and her team that they respect the real event and the people that lost their lives.

Teaching analytical skills in ThingLink

The escape room demonstrates to students the importance of assessing evidence in an objective way. Dwitney wanted to show how evidence could be manipulated, and landed on the idea of a faked weather report. Students go through a simulation of one day during the voyage to explore witness statements, transmissions, newspapers and other primary source documents. Every piece of evidence is found by exploring the tags throughout the scenes, which may contain images, text, music or videos. Whilst working through the puzzles, additional help and support is provided by an animated AI assistant who provides additional evidence that he has “discovered”.

Scenario Builder: Perfect tool for creating multi-linear learning

Whilst working on the renders, Dwitney heard about ThingLink’s new Scenario Builder tool. She had been keen to add some sort of timer to her games but this wasn’t possible using the main ThingLink editor. Having explored what Scenario Builder was capable of creating, Dwitney realised that the format would provide the ideal way for students to explore the ship their way, without being told where to go next. They can move between floors in a “choose your own adventure” way, using multi-linear paths and using their reasoning skills to deduct where they should go next. A wrong decision has consequences, such as not being able to reach the lifeboats in time.

“We decided; let’s fictionalise the mystery part of it, but do it in a way where they can still go through the historical accounts. We wanted to do a mix of puzzles as well as trivia questions as well as just exploring stuff. So we added videos and clips and a lot of multimedia – to make it innovative and fun.”

Dwitney Bethel, Urban Escapade

Designing the graphic elements of the escape room

Dwitney works remotely with an architectural designer who creates the 360 renders using Sketchup, although a similar 360 scene could be created easily using Skybox. The AI assistant was created very simply using Canva, with a video on a loop and an audio file added which Dwitney had created using a text-to-speech converter. She also used Canva for creating much of the imagery and pieces of evidence.

How do students use this escape room?

Students work through the escape game tutorials either in groups or individually, with Dwitney on screen to help them if they get stuck at any point! Depending on the age of the students, she sometimes also provides background information, instructions or evidence before the game starts, for students to read up on.

When completing the challenge in a group, one student might write down all the evidence the group finds. They then discuss which floor to visit next and decide as a group the course of action. Dwitney helps them through as a guide when required, and asks them to name their top two suspects. The students then discover if they were correct!

What do students think of the escape room?

Dwitney has received excellent feedback from both students and their parents for this latest escape room. This has led to students and parents requesting more escape room lessons from Dwitney on Outschool.

“This is the most fun we’ve ever had we can’t wait to do more!”

Student feedback

Students respond that they enjoy controlling the direction of the experience and being responsible for their decisions, rather than being told where to go and what to do next. Dwitney has taught students from Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, the UK and will often be given requests for the theme of a new escape room.

“The kids will always give me ideas for the next one. They may ask for one themed around their favorite TV shows or they might say that they enjoy fantasy stuff or sci-fi. So I’m always trying to think of new themes and coming up with something different.”

Dwitney Bethel, Urban Escapade

Why do escape rooms make such excellent teaching resources?

Escape rooms work so well from a pedagogy point of view because they teach so much more than the subject material contained within them! Integral to every escape room are problem-solving skills and reasoning, as well as working under pressure if you use a timer. However, use them as virtual team activities, and you add a whole other level of soft skills such as teamwork, co-operation and group decision making.

For a great use of this in action, see our case study on the medical escape room created by Dr Abhi Jones for remote teams of students at the University of Central Lancashire. Whilst team building activities were not in fact the main remit of the challenge, the qualitative feedback from students was that it was an invaluable exercise for improving communication, delegation, operating as a team under stress and looking after other team members.

Benefits of creating a virtual escape room

Unlike a physical escape room, where there are certain limitations to the setting, a virtual breakout room is only limited by your imagination, creativity or graphic design skills and platforms available to you and your team. You can therefore create an epic or fantastical setting, or one steeped in a specific historical era or location. Perhaps a Harry Potter themed escape from Hogwarts for younger students? Or one based on a favourite movie, TV or book series for older students? You can now create limitless fantasy worlds in immersive 360 for your ThingLink escape rooms and other games with our Skybox integration!

Create your own virtual escape room

Escape rooms are so simple to create with ThingLink – and you can choose whether to use Scenario Builder as Dwitney did, or simply to use the ThingLink main editor.

Creating Escape Rooms in the main ThingLink editor

Here is an example below of how you can create one this way. We have used maths riddles in all our rooms, which we have themed to match each room or space. But the questions and content could be on any subject. Simply add a Transit Tag – and turn “Conditional Transition” on. Only by entering the correct answer can the user “escape” to the next room in sequence. They keep moving through rooms, areas or scenes, having to answer questions in the tags each time, until they reach the final room and escape. You can add clues in tags in each room as they go which they need to escape each individual room, as well as for the final challenge in the last room in the sequence.

Creating Escape Rooms in ThingLink’s Scenario Builder

The difference between creating escape rooms in the main ThingLink editor and in Scenario Builder is that instead of one linear path that the user has to take from room to room, you can create multiple paths or consequences in Scenario Builder depending on the choice or response. A choose your own adventure game! You can also add the timer function to the entire game, or to individual sections with Scenario Builder.

“Because I can now use Scenario Builder, this is the first time that I could really go all out without constraint. This is probably the most excited I’ve ever been for a project because I had the Titanic theme on the back burner for a long time. Because until now we didn’t have the tools to do it the way that I actually wanted to do it.”

Dwitney Bethel, Urban Escapade

ThingLink: A responsive platform that adapts to user needs and feedback

“I told ThingLink about the areas that I would have liked to change over the years. They’ve always kept me up to date with any changes and that’s how [my work] has been able to grow. So as ThingLink added different features, I did as well. And so it’s been a great tool and resource for me.”

Dwitney Bethel, Urban Escapade

If there is a feature or development you would like to suggest for ThingLink, please get in touch! Our team are always open to new ideas: in fact many of the new features that we have introduced over the last few years have been a direct result of our customer feedback and suggestions. We also love to see how you have been using ThingLink, so if you would like to be featured in a similar case study, do let us know!

More escape room ideas from our blog

Virtual team building activities and employee training games

Create your own scenario based learning with our new templates

Using ThingLink to develop virtual team building

A guide to creating amazing immersive learning resources

More inspiration this way!

Join our active groups and communities on social media for more inspiration:

• ThingLink LinkedIn Page | LinkedIn Community
• X / Twitter ThingLink Page | X / Twitter ThingLink Edu Page | X / Twitter Creative Learning Design Community
• ThingLink Education Facebook Group

In the age of eLearning, many educators and corporate trainers are searching for innovative tools and strategies to create effective and interactive online courses. ThingLink’s Scenario Builder templates have been developed as the easiest to use tool in this arena. Designed for both novice and veteran instructional design experts, this tool allows you to easily construct completely bespoke, real-life learning experiences that promote learner engagement, decision-making and critical thinking.

Why Scenario-Based Learning (SBL) Works

Scenario-based learning (SBL) is an active learning strategy that places learners in a real-life or realistic scenario that simulates their own work environment or situation, requiring them to use decision-making and problem-solving skills. This type of eLearning course offers an effective learning experience by mimicking real-world situations, allowing learners to practice new skills or understand concepts in a safe environment. It’s a powerful tool, especially in corporate training settings, where soft skills and decision-making are essential.

Benefits of Scenario-Based Learning

• Retention: By participating in real-world scenarios, learners tend to remember the concepts better and for longer periods.
• Interactivity: Interactive scenarios can incorporate gamification, realistic videos and easy to understand animations, time-pressures and decision points, fostering active participation and engagement. With ThingLink, you can easily incorporate multimedia into your training. Add mages, videos, 360 images and videos, animations and 3D objects, to make your scenarios more engaging.
• Real-World Context: It helps in bridging the gap between theory and practice, offering a real-world context to potentially abstract concepts.
• Safe Environment: Learners can make mistakes without any real-life consequences, making it perfect for compliance training or any training where errors can be costly.

Watch and learn

Some short videos at our dedicated YouTube playlist shows just how easy it is to build interactive scenario based learning with ThingLink! Hear from ThingLink Founder and CEO Ulla-Maaria Koivula on the top features of the tool, and watch a webinar where we create an entire learning scenario from scratch in under 20 minutes.

Explore: Example course in ThingLink’s Scenario Builder

Using ThingLink’s Scenario Builder Templates

Creating an online course or training program becomes substantially easier with tools like ThingLink’s Scenario Builder. And now our easy-to-adapt and edit templates make it even simpler and quicker! Here’s how to start planning your scenario-based learning content from scratch:

1. Identify Learning Needs: Understand your learners’ needs and set clear learning objectives. Do you need them to learn a new process or skill? Do you need them to understand a concept? Are you trying to enhance their problem-solving abilities? Or focus on soft skills? Perhaps you want staff to work on a module together to enhance and improve their teamwork?
2. Choose the Right Template: ThingLink currently offers four types of scenario templates for you to use and adapt (see more below). From branching scenarios that simulate decision-making pathways to microlearning modules ideal for SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) on the go, there’s a template that you can use and adapt for every learning strategy.
3. Design Scenarios: Using ThingLink, integrate real-life situations and design scenarios that promote critical thinking. Incorporate decision points, challenges, and possible outcomes based on the storyline you want to convey. Pro Tip: Solid planning in the best foundation for building your course! You can use pencil and paper, flipcharts, online tools – or why not use our handy Canva Whiteboard template – see link below!
4. Test & Revise: Before launching your eLearning course, test it among a small group. Gather feedback and revise the scenarios accordingly to ensure effective learning.

The Self-Exploratory Scenario Template

The scenario featured above was based on the Self-Exploratory Scenario template, where learners can choose the path or branch they would like to go down first, depending on their own individual needs. Once they have finished that branch, they can then either finish the scenario, or go back and choose another branch to explore. Summative and formative assessment can be added if required, but this isn’t necessary.

What other types of scenario templates are there?

In these related blogs you can explore example of courses created with the simple but engaging Linear template, the Escape Room template and the Simulation Scenario template. Or see the full guidance document linked below where we also look at all four models.

Free downloads and templates to help you get started

• You can read about all four of the templates, how they behave and how they could be used at this comprehensive guidance document to download and keep.

• If you would like to copy the templates for the media used in the course above, you can modify and adapt the Canva template which includes each individual scene.
• Planning tool: Our handy Canva Whiteboard template will help with planning out your scenario
• 360 images in an instant: One of the best ways to create truly immersive content is to add interactive 360 images to your course. If you don’t have a 360 camera, our Pano to 360 tool is completely free to use – no ThingLink account required! Simply upload any panoramic photos from your smartphone and it’s converted instantly, ready to download.

Examples of Scenarios in Online Training

• Corporate Training: Design a challenging situation where an employee navigates office politics, demonstrating soft skills and problem-solving.
• Compliance Training: Create a scenario where the learner must choose the correct course of action based on company regulations.
• Soft Skills Training: An interactive scenario might revolve around a difficult customer, where the learner must employ patience and understanding.

Integrating Learning Scenarios in Existing Training Programs

For educators or corporate trainers with existing training programs, ThingLink’s scenario builder templates can supplement and elevate the learning experiences. Whether you aim for better learner engagement, higher retention rates, or simply a more immersive real-life learning strategy, scenarios can provide the real-world context your course might be missing. training content created in Scenario Builder can be embedded into other authoring tools like Articulate Storyline. It also integrates fully into any LMS, or can be embedded anywhere or even shared with a direct link.

What are you waiting for? Start building your first course today!

Incorporating ThingLink’s scenario builder templates into your online training or online course ensures a high degree of interactivity, placing learners in real-life situations that resonate and are relatable. This approach not only promotes decision-making and critical thinking but also ensures that learners are better prepared for the challenges of the real world.

From microlearning modules perfect for quick refreshers to extensive branching scenarios that mirror complex decision-making pathways, ThingLink offers the versatility to cater to various learning needs.

In the evolving realm of eLearning, where the focus is gradually shifting from passive consumption to active learning, tools like ThingLink, combined with effective instructional design, can significantly transform learning outcomes. Whether it’s in corporate training, retail, hospitality or any number of other sectors, the potential benefits of scenario-based learning are vast, making it a compelling choice for educators and trainers worldwide.

Join the conversation

Get inspired by some of the content shared by our creative communities!

• ThingLink LinkedIn Page 
• LinkedIn Community 
• X / Twitter ThingLink Page 
• X / Twitter ThingLink Edu Page
• X / Twitter Creative Learning Design Community 
• ThingLink Education Facebook Group. 

• ThingLink Facebook Page 
• Instagram ThingLink

In the world of elearning and corporate training, creating engaging and effective online courses that truly engage your trainees is every course creator’s goal. With the surge in demand for online training, educators and corporate trainers are constantly on the lookout for innovative tools and techniques that cater to the learning needs of their learners, but that are simple to use, build and update. Enter ThingLink’s Scenario Builder templates: a game-changer for elearning course creation.

Why Choose Scenario-Based Learning (SBL)?

Scenario-Based Learning (SBL) is an instructional design strategy that replicates real-world situations, placing learners in a decision-making role. It enhances critical thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making skills by immersing learners in real-life situations that demand these competencies.

Benefits of Scenario-Based Learning:

1. Real-world Context: SBL offers a realistic scenario, allowing learners to connect their learning experiences with real-world applications. This bridges the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application.
2. Active Learning: Instead of passive consumption, learners engage in active decision-making, promoting retention and deeper understanding.
3. Safe Environment: It offers a risk-free environment where mistakes become learning opportunities without real-life consequences.

Learn more about ThingLink’s Scenario Builder

Check out our dedicated YouTube playlist featuring short videos that demonstrate the simplicity of crafting interactive scenario-based learning with ThingLink. Listen to insights from ThingLink’s Founder and CEO, Ulla-Maaria Koivula, as she highlights the tool’s standout features. Plus, catch a webinar where we design a complete learning scenario from the ground up in less than 20 minutes.

Leveraging ThingLink’s Scenario Builder Templates

Creating a compelling storyline for your elearning course can be challenging. However, ThingLink’s templates make it easier, providing a foundation upon which you can build your learning scenarios.

1. Choose the Right Type of Scenario: Depending on your learning objectives and the complexity of the subject matter, you can opt for microlearning episodes that follow a linear path (or paths) – or more extended multi-branching scenarios. For instance, compliance training may need in-depth branching, while soft skills training can benefit from shorter, focused (but still highly interactive) linear scenarios.
2. Incorporate Real-life Elements: Use 360 images and videos, with added interactive elements, that replicate real-life situations to create a sense of authenticity. This boosts learner engagement and mirrors the challenges they might face in a real-world context.
3. Decision Points: Integrate decision points within your scenarios to test and enhance learners’ decision-making and problem-solving abilities.
4. Gamification: Adding elements of gamification, like scores or badges, as well as timers to increase the pressure, can make the learning experience even more engaging.

Integrating with Other Authoring Tools

While ThingLink is powerful on its own, integrating it with other authoring tools can amplify its capabilities. For instance, combining it with tools like Articulate Storyline can allow you to import PowerPoint slides, enhancing the interactivity and richness of your elearning course.

Learning Needs and SMEs (Subject Matter Experts)

Before diving into the design scenarios, it’s crucial to identify the learning needs of your target audience. Collaborating with SMEs can also ensure that your content is accurate and aligns with the desired learning outcomes.

The Perfect Tool to Create Microlearning Experiences

Microlearning refers to bite-sized learning modules, often spanning 5-10 minutes. This strategy aligns with the modern learner’s attention span and is perfect for teaching new skills. By utilizing ThingLink’s templates, creating effective microlearning modules becomes a breeze.

Scenario Templates and Corporate Training

The four different scenario builder template we have developed can be tailored and adapted for different aspects of corporate training. For example:

1. Soft Skills: Our Simulation Scenario template is ideal for this type of training. In the blog Create Branched Learning Scenarios with ThingLink’s New Simulation Template we show how this template has been used to build a scenario exploring Leadership Styles. Alternatively you could use the simple but effective Linear Template, which still allows plenty of scope for exploring interactive and immersive content incorporating 360 images and videos and rich multimedia annotation. You could also build your scenario using the Self-Exploratory template which allows the learner to follow the branch related to the subject of their choice.
2. Compliance Training: For this type of training, it’s best to use a template like our Escape Room model, where employees are faced with decision points and see the immediate consequence of these, ensuring they understand company policies and real-world implications. Below is an example of a short course we have built using the escape room template.

The Escape Room model

Get started with our free downloads and templates

• Dive deep into our four templates by accessing our detailed guidance document – it’s available for download and is a valuable resource to understand each template’s functionality and potential applications.
• If you’re inspired by the media used in our showcased information security course and wish to adapt it, feel free to modify our Canva template, which covers every individual scene.
• For sketching out your scenarios, our Canva Whiteboard template is at your service.
• Create your own immersive content: Enhance your course with interactive 360-degree images. Don’t have a 360 camera? No worries! Our Pano to 360 tool, which doesn’t even require a ThingLink account, is at your disposal. Just upload your panoramic photos from your phone, and they’ll be transformed into 360 images instantly, all set for free download.

Maximizing Learner Engagement

The success of any online course lies in its ability to engage its learners. By designing an interactive scenario using ThingLink’s Scenario Builder templates, educators and trainers can ensure that learners are not just passive recipients but active participants in their learning journey.

Elearning made easy!

Scenario builder templates by ThingLink have revolutionized the elearning landscape, offering an unparalleled level of interactivity and realism for the learners or trainees, combined with ease of build for the creators. Whether it’s for corporate training or broader online training programs, using these templates ensures that learners are equipped with not just knowledge, but the critical thinking and problem-solving skills needed for real-world success. Incorporating gamification, microlearning, and other modern learning strategies, these easy-to-adapt templates are the future of effective learning in a digital age.

Join the conversation

Get inspired by some of the content shared by our creative communities!

• ThingLink LinkedIn Page 
• LinkedIn Community 
• X / Twitter ThingLink Page 
• X / Twitter ThingLink Edu Page
• X / Twitter Creative Learning Design Community 
• ThingLink Education Facebook Group. 

• ThingLink Facebook Page 
• Instagram ThingLink

Now On-Demand

Sign Up for the Replay and Resources

Registration

In the world of eLearning, branching scenarios have emerged as a powerful tool to amplify employee engagement and real-world decision-making skills. By allowing learners to “pick their own path”, these scenarios mirror complex situations, making learning deeper and more memorable. Dive in with us to discover how the ThingLink Scenario Builder can be your secret weapon in designing these transformative learning experiences.

The Magic of Branching

Ever reminisced about those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books? Branching scenarios function similarly. Learners are presented with situations and make choices, with each decision leading them down a unique path. This interactive method boosts decision-making skills, critical thinking, and retention.

ThingLink Scenario Builder: Branching Made Easy

Navigating the terrain of branching might seem complex, but with the ThingLink Scenario Builder, it’s as intuitive as it gets. Its user-friendly interface supports the creation of intricate paths, ensuring that each learner’s experience is tailored and impactful.

Couldn’t join us?

Sign up anyway and we’ll make sure you receive a link to the action replay!

Check out this sample branching scenario!

By the end of this masterclass, participants will be able to:

• Grasp Branching Fundamentals: Understand the underlying principles and benefits of branching, or “pick your own path”, learning experiences.
• Navigate ThingLink with Confidence: Identify and utilize the primary features of ThingLink’s Scenario Builder, especially those that facilitate branching scenarios.
• Design Engaging Branching Scenarios: Apply best practices to generate context-based learning modules with multiple decision points using ThingLink.
• Incorporate Multimedia Elements Seamlessly: Embed 360 degree media, videos, images, and other multimedia components to support and enhance the branching experiences.
• Evaluate and Iterate Branching Modules: Gather feedback on their branching scenarios, analyze learner paths, and refine for maximum engagement and effectiveness.
  Integrate into LMS: Ensure smooth integration of ThingLink branching scenarios into various Learning Management Systems (LMS).

Other Ideas for learning about ThingLink you’ll love!

• Free ThingLink Certified Creator Course
• Previous ThingLink On Demand Webinars
• Search Support Articles or Request Support

Connect and Collaborate

For more ideas, use cases and inspiration on content creation, join our communities on social media! LinkedIn Community, Twitter Creative Learning Design Community and ThingLink Education Facebook Group.

The online training revolution is here!

For anyone who needs to create employee and workplace training, there are now a range of easy-to-use and cost-effective online content creation platforms that they can use. And almost all of these incorporate AI in different ways. From easily-editable templates, copy suggestions, and AI-generated presenters who can read your script perfectly without any need for edits – they can all help you to put your content together easily and quickly, even if this is your first course. Each of these platforms saves you time at every step of the creation process, resulting in enormous cumulative time savings.

Anyone can create immersive training content

Using this new generation of tools and platforms, we believe that it really is possible for ANYONE to create their first immersive and engaging online training module from scratch in five days.

We’re going to show you how, with a simple step-by-step guide, using accessible and easy to use platforms such as ThingLink, Canva, D-ID, and ChatGPT.

We know that bespoke site-specific training content and images can be vital for workplace training. So we have included instructions on how to create immersive virtual training simulations using 360 images of your own real-life work environments, using nothing more complicated than a smartphone.

At each step we show how using AI tools can save you hours each day in creating, editing and formatting your content to create slick and professional-looking training for your organisation. Each of the platforms in our 5 day action plan has been designed so that anyone can use them with no prior experience or know-how. You won’t believe how easy and FAST it is to create your own interactive training content once you have the right tools!

The benefits of delivering online employee training

Online training, or elearning, allows employees to access on-demand training materials from any location, at any time, and often even via their own mobile device. This means that it’s easier for staff to fit training sessions into their busy schedules and family commitments. Virtual training also allows for personalized learning experiences, as it can be tailored to the individual needs of each employee, enabling them to learn at their own pace and focus on areas where they need improvement.

Online learning should ideally incorporate interactive and engaging formats, such as videos, quizzes, and simulations. Interactivity has been shown to enhance skills and knowledge retention amongst learners and is now seen as invaluable for effective workplace training.

In this blog we summarized recent research into the effectiveness of training using VR and AR.

Online training is cost-effective training

Training is an unavoidable and ongoing cost for any organisation. From inductions for new hires, upskilling sessions, soft skills development and employee engagement for the current workforce, to refresher courses for those coming back after parental leave, illness or a career break – employee training is an ongoing cycle which can be draining on resources.

As well as the costs of training delivery itself, costs of in-person training can often include additional expense such as travel and venue hire. Ensuring that onboarding and compliance training is delivered as needed whenever any new employee joins the organisation, rather than more economically delivered as a group, can increase costs even further.

The beauty of online training courses is that they are generally vastly cheaper than in-person training. The approach that we have outlined in this blog is incredibly cost effective for even small organisations, and when scaled to larger ones, can make annual cost savings to the tune of thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. Importantly, there is no need to invest in costly employee training software, learning programs or training platforms. Indeed the broad functionality of all the apps and platforms we list here means that they can usually be used across an organisation for other purposes, particularly marketing-related activity.

Create online training programs in-house for increased flexibility and responsiveness

In rapidly changing work environments, for example where legislation changes regularly, virtual training provides an effective and efficient way to keep employees updated with the latest skills and knowledge. If your training is created in-house, you can easily and instantly edit and update your training materials without the need for costly and time-intensive authoring by a third party supplier. When training modules are created and hosted in the cloud, this also means that changes are made instantly – everywhere.

However, creating online training from scratch can be an overwhelming proposition, particularly if you have a tight timeline in which to create and deliver training courses.

The good news is that by familiarising yourself with easy-to-learn, user-friendly AI tools and other digital platforms, ANYONE can streamline the creation process to create their first training module in just five days.

For this illustration, our example training material will be the first part of an onboarding course for new starters at a large organisation. But the same process could be used for any kind of training course for any size of organisation. Let’s get started!

A day by day task list to build your own online training from scratch

Day 1: Define your objectives and create an outline or roadmap for your online course content

Start by deciding and outlining your training goals. What do you want your employees to learn from the training? What skills or knowledge should they finish the course with?

Based on these specific goals or objectives, create an outline of the topics to be covered in order. This outline will serve as your training content roadmap whilst you create your course, and can also be used to introduce the course to your trainees at the start of the course!

Your AI helpers: At this stage, you can use ChatGPT, Jasper, Bard – or any similar generative AI copy tool to help you create your objectives. These tools are incredibly useful for generating lists and sparking inspiration.

In action: Here’s an example of how quickly ChatGPT can generate a list of topics to include in your training course. Our example is an onboarding or induction course, so we asked ChatGPT for a list of possible objectives. (Fullscreen to see the detail.)

Top tips: It’s important to be specific when writing your prompts, to give the AI tool as much detail as possible from which it can generate a helpful, relevant and useful list. Of course you can go back and regenerate if it’s not quite right, and then use this first pass as your basis to edit and refine your ideal course roadmap. You can ask ChatGPT (or similar) to generate more detail for each section, or you can populate the finer details yourself.

Finally, decide on the media you’ll use to explain each objective or topic. This will depend very much on what your course involves. But for most subjects, as well as written content, this should ideally include videos, images, or even virtual environments. In our example, we are going to use all of these, to demonstrate how easy it is to create and combine different formats of training content.

Day 2: Gather any images and write your scripts for your training

Written content

You can use ChatGPT or another content creation tool to help on day 2 too.

You can also use AI to:

• Suggest examples, best-practices, scenarios
• Provide curated lists, such as top tens eg use cases
• Re-write text in different formats. For example, re-write bulleted information points in a question and answer format, as a quiz, or even in verse to help staff memorise important points!
• Re-write your content in a different or brand-specific tone of voice

Visual content

As a benchmark, your training should include images and video for interest and freshness. If necessary you can use stock imagery. Ideally however, your visuals should be taken from real-life as much as possible – particularly when demonstrating or introducing a site or environment.

Immersive 360 visuals of your environment

For an immersive and truly engaging experience for your learners, and to allow them to explore their specific work environments during training, 360 imagery is unbeatable. However until very recently, it was difficult to produce 360 images of any work environment without expensive 360 cameras.

This is where ThingLink’s Pano to 360 tool is invaluable! In short, Pano to 360 allows you to take a panoramic photo on your smartphone – of any environment, inside or outside – and create a fully immersive 360 image. This can provide an accurate replication of a real-world environment which is ideal for induction or safety training. The example below was created in this way.

Watch the video below for a brief overview of how it works. Alternatively you can read our launch blog here. Better still, visit our site here and try it for yourself! It’s completely free and unlimited – and you don’t even need a ThingLink account to use it.

Day 3: Create your engaging branded visuals with Canva

Now you’ve written and collected the text and images for your course, it’s time to start working on the overall design!

Anyone can use Canva, the online graphic design tool, to help create visually appealing and high quality training materials – even with no design experience! In Canva you can choose from the thousands of templates available, for all types of training content – and customize them according to your brand and training requirements.

It’s even easy to create videos from scratch with Canva’s huge range of templates to help you get started. However for your first course creation, you may prefer to begin by simply using it to develop and apply a consistent branded visual style across all your training materials. Use the same color palette, fonts, and design elements to create a cohesive look.

Remember your road map from Day 1? You can use Canva to design this into a roadmap that can be used in the course welcome and orientation section! Take a look at our example below for how this might look. We used the Teal Blue Employee Onboarding Template which we chose in the video above.

For lots more inspiration on how you can use Canva to create branded content, see our blog Ten free templates for ThingLink and Canva.

Day 4: Use D-ID to speed up your training video creation

D-ID is a platform that specializes in creating hyper-realistic video content using AI. Utilize this brilliantly simple tool to generate lifelike, AI-driven videos of trainers, without the need for actual filming and editing. Here’s a video below that took less than a minute to generate!

If you are creating an entire online employee training program and using video introductions or explanations, D-ID will truly save you days worth of recording and editing time! The video we created above ,which we will now embed into our training environment, was created in just a few clicks! See below for a demo of how quickly it can be generated.

With D-ID you can also:

• upload your own images, to create a video of yourself or another colleague presenting the information;
• generate a bespoke avatar of your own by using their text-to-image portrait generator;
• upload text in 119 Languages, along with a variety of accents and speaking styles
• upload a voice recording for the avatar to “read” out;
• choose from a range of expressions or styles for the avatar. Some you might like to choose for training are cheerful, excited, friendly or hopeful;
• choose from a range of backgrounds for the avatar to stand in front of, which could for example be chosen to match your organisation’s brand colours, or help with visual accessibility.
• Top tip: Canva now features a D-ID integration, meaning that it’s even faster to incorporate your videos into your visuals!

Day 5: Use ThingLink to wrap up all your training content in a virtual tour or branched learning scenario

ThingLink empowers you create virtual tours, virtual environments and branched learning scenarios with interactive images, videos, and 360-degree content. Upload your Canva visuals to ThingLink and add clickable multimedia tags that display text, images, videos, or links.

Your interactive ThingLink content can then be used to create a learning scenario, using the super simple Scenario Builder tool. The path that your learner takes can be branched or simply linear. Simply upload your images, videos and 360 images into ThingLink, add your tags to make them interactive, then use these individual scenes to build your scenario.

The great news is that you can even use ThingLink’s inbuilt AI tools to help create your tags, re-write text and even suggest questions and branches for your scenario! Check out ThingLink’s AI YouTube playlist here with 30 second shorts explaining all our super-handy AI content creation tools which will save you even more time!

Sample training content created using the AI-powered platforms above

Explore the short onboarding example below to see how we have created part of a training module using the platforms and content we have covered above.

Alternative ways to present employee training in ThingLink.

Interactive 360 images are so useful and versatile that they can be used to create virtual field trips, virtual exhibitions, even escape rooms for gamification of your training. Here are some examples of where ThingLink been used for staff training in the tourism and hospitality industry.

• Using ThingLink to create Virtual Tours in the Tourism Industry – a case study

• How to Create Virtual Training Environments for Students

ThingLink Guided Tours

Another way to present training in ThingLink is with new Guided Tours. Explore this example of employee safety training below!

FAQs

We have a tiny training budget! Isn’t it expensive to invest in AI content creation tools?

The tools we have listed above have a range of pricing models which are suited to organisations of all sizes. The fundamental aspect which unites them all is their ease of use, meaning that you don’t have to outsource your training content creation to 3rd party supplies – you can build everything in house!

Do I need to host my training materials on an e-learning platform?

No. Whilst it’s true that interactive learning created with ThingLink can be shared on any Learning Management System (LMS) or Learning Experience Platform (LXP), it can also be shared via Microsoft Teams, or even with a direct link or embed if you prefer.

Our training materials are confidential. What about security?

Security is vitally important to us. ThingLink supports SAML, Microsoft logins, Azure Tenant ID and Ping Identity for user identification if you require it.

Simply the fastest way to create immersive online training and elearning!

Hopefully we have demonstrated that creating truly tailored and engaging online employee training in just five days is feasible for anyone. By using the systematic approach outlined above, you can quickly develop a really immersive, personalized training solution, whatever your training needs. All you need is the right tools! Happy creating!

Looking for more training and elearning inspiration?

For more inspiration, make sure you’re following us on social media. In particular, please do join our Facebook Education Group and our LinkedIn Community.

Stuhr Museum in Nebraska used ThingLink’s Scenario Builder to create an emotive and immersive branched learning experience that gives learners an insight into the lives of three real-life ordinary teachers from the pioneer period. By facing the same choices that the three young women were each forced to make over one day in 1888, school students were given an interactive insight into what it might have felt to live this experience.

ThingLink spoke to Carly Harroun and Emily Byerly of Stuhr Museum to find out more about the project. 

About Stuhr Museum

Stuhr Museum is a living history museum in Nebraska which was founded in 1962. Its mission is to share the collective human experience of community building along the Platte River Valley. It provides immersive historical, educational, and cultural experiences for visitors to its 208 acres and 107 buildings. 

Central to the site is Railroad Town, a representation of an 1890s-era prairie settlement. The town is a collection of buildings that together show what a prairie town might have been in the period. It features a bank, post office, general store, newspaper office, blacksmith and tinsmith shops, a wood planing mill and more. Many of these buildings are original artefacts, dating from the 1890s-early 1900s period, whilst the homes were all relocated from their original sites in nearby Grand Island.

Living historians work at the town and bring it to life as it might have been in the pioneer age, dressed in period costume and interacting with visitors to help them interpret the past and visualise what life was like in the 1890s. The museum provides a variety of field trips to Railroad Town to school students, generally from Kindergarten through to 8th grade. 

The first virtual visits using ThingLink

During the height of the covid pandemic, the museum was closed. Even when restrictions were relaxed, the immersive and hands-on nature of the field trips made them difficult. From May 2020 the museum started to look for a way to make virtual versions of their educational opportunities. 

Museum Creative Director Carly Harroun had discovered ThingLink from a former college professor and realised that it was a platform that could be used to create an immersive experience that was as close as possible to a hands-on school visit. 

From the Summer of 2020, the museum started creating virtual versions of the field trips using ThingLink. The museum educators were filmed as if they were talking to the students and they also created teacher handouts. These included worksheets and some further information; they were then presented together in a package for each topic. Schools were given access by link for two weeks, during which time they could complete the learning materials. 

Topics included the Pawnee (the tribe that inhabited the land that the Stuhr Museum is on today), as well as the pioneer trails, rural school and spring on the farm. However as visitors were able to start coming back to the museum for hands-on experiences, schools usually opted for the in-person classes over the virtual versions, if their location made a trip possible.  

Museum adds interactivity to the virtual experiences using Scenario Builder

Emily Byerly joined the museum as Director of Education in June 2022. Her vision for the virtual school visits was to continue to provide some sort of virtual opportunities that were hands-on and immersive. She was keen to provide material relevant to the museum’s particular local area within Nebraska.  She was also keen that it should be accessible to schools that were too far away from the museum to visit in a day, including those in different states. 

The original tours had proved popular, but the directors felt the format could be further improved.

“Even schools who had never before interacted with the museum utilized our virtual programs. But because the original virtual classes we made were based on filmed versions of the in-person classes, they were lacking in interactivity. We wanted to find ways that it could be different.”

Carly Harroun, Stuhr Museum Creative Director

As the two directors discussed possible formats and platforms that might be able to produce something both immersive and engaging, the subject of “choose your own adventure” story books kept emerging. Creative Director Carly Harroun had taken ThingLink’s Certified Creator Course and so was aware that ThingLink’s Scenario Builder is often described as a modern, Education Technology interpretation of this format. An interpretation which the directors describe as “Choose your own adventure meets tech meets history”!

They then needed to find a story that would work well in a branching scenario. Ideally it would feature characters who all chose a different path when faced with a life-changing event. It should be an experience that could equally be used by teachers as supplemental to the field trips or as a standalone experience. They wanted students in any location to be able to use the material to learn about history and the human experience in general.

Scenario format captures our common human experience

Carly Harroun explains:

“The museum is a Humanities organization. We want people and students to realize that history isn’t just names and dates from far away that are just two-dimensional, or black and white. They were real people and so it’s important to find learning opportunities for students to start thinking “What would I do in this situation?” Or “How did this feel?” and building that empathy and connection.” 

One particular event in Nebraskan history leant itself well to the format: one that has come to be known as “The School Children’s Blizzard” of 1888. This event is covered in one of the museum’s in-person classes in Stuhr Museum’s Rural School. The event was exactly what the two directors were looking for. It featured enormous drama, but it also emphasises the human experience common to us all, through the stories of the three teachers who were forced to make what would eventually be life or death decisions. Evidence with which to create the scenario was also easily accessible, as the stories of the three protagonists had been heavily reported-on at the time.

Scenario structure: Within the scenario, the students are given background to the event using text and photos. They then have to start making a series of choices which will determine the path that they take through the scenario. At each stage they can see the consequence of that choice, which is based on what we know about the real-life events. Once they reach the end of the scenario, they are told which of the three young women took that path and what the ultimate outcome was.

The interactive scenario format helps tell stories that resonate

The resulting scenario is one which makes a huge emotional impact. It very successfully builds a sense of empathy and common purpose between the learner and the three young women, giving an urgency and relevance to their stories despite the passage of time.

“Storytelling is something that we’re really trying to emphasise across the museum, since our mission is to share the collective human experience of community building along the Platte River Valley. Our motto is “Your story is our history” and we use storytelling as a vehicle to connect with that empathy in people. To show that these were actual people just like you. They maybe spoke a little different, they dressed a little different, their living situations were different. But they were still people with the full range of emotions that we have today. Within the specific, you find the universal. So whilst we are honing in on three very specific stories that happen in 1888 in this specific portion of the United States, it’s something that can resonate with everyone – that struggle and that pain. People have similar or different struggles today that still connect in some way.” 

Carly Harroun

Responsible content creation when using historical source material

They based the content on a lot of primary resources, particularly archived newspapers – but there were still blanks to be filled in for the scenario to work as a set of stories. For the directors, it was crucial that those blanks were filled in in a responsible way. With the help of the museum’s 19th century subject matter experts they tried to ensure that this was done in a historically plausible way. 

Co-workers, peers and local subject matter experts proofread the scenario along the way, ensuring that it was polished and the kind of quality of product that was museum standard. Emily used her extensive experience within education to ensure that the text was grade level appropriate and that the topics were covered in a sensitive way. The museum also added a disclaimer, since the content covers some difficult topics. 

The scenario supports cross-curricular learning

For schools, the most popular elements of the original virtual classes had been the text-based ones. If a virtual program contained enough text, schools were able to use it for their English language arts and reading provision while concurrently teaching students about history.

The text based elements were also popular with adult learners. The Literacy Council of Grand Island is local to the museum and works with adults who are learning how to read and speak English. For that reason, some of the museum’s original virtual programs were made more textual so that they could be used for adult evening classes. The teachers used the Microsoft Immersive Reader embedded in ThingLink to instantly translate into the various languages required in any particular class. 

For these reasons, text content was also a key consideration for the blizzard scenario, meaning that it too fulfils a dual purpose as both a history and language arts learning resource.

Pricing model and use

The scenario is now available to buy at $25 per classroom for 2 weeks of virtual access. Within the museum it’s already been used for training purposes as a medium for storytelling. It will also be used to train the living history apprentices, who are all local teenage volunteers. 

Future plans

The directors have additional ideas that they plan to develop for older students in a similar way. Carly had seen how ThingLink has been used at the Highland Folk Museum in Scotland, another living history museum and a comparable organization. She is particularly inspired by their use of 360 imagery of the interiors of the historical buildings and plans to create something similar at Stuhr. 

Tips to design scenarios like this:

• Map it out beforehand, including the decision points and outcomes of each choice. For both directors, the hardest part of the process was working out exactly how the three storylines could be represented in parallel. Carly explains the dilemma. “Three different teachers made different decisions within a fairly similar environment. But where should it branch off? How much information is given beforehand? There had to be enough context for people who have never taken the class up here and maybe don’t even know where Nebraska is, or what schools were like in 1888.”  
• Make sure you have all the resources to hand from the start. 
• Use Canva to create the graphic elements and give them a sense of continuity. 
• Write the scenario in the second person to make it more personal to the learner so that they can imagine how it would have felt to be in that situation. 

With grateful thanks to Carly Harroun, Creative Director and
Emily Byerly, Director of Education at Stuhr Museum for allowing us to share this wonderful example!

What else can Scenario Based Learning be used for?

Creating this type of scenario based learning (SBL) based on real-life situations is an extremely effective way for museum and history educators to make their experiences more immersive. However it’s also an approach to instructional design that is increasingly being used in many other areas of online training and elearning courses. Recreating a challenging situation from a real-world context that incorporates decision-making is a type of active learning that helps strengthen problem-solving and critical thinking skills. It encourages high levels of learner engagement – which in turn leads to better knowledge retention. For this reason it’s now used as an effective learning strategy within many corporate training programs, particularly compliance training and onboarding.

For more examples of scenarios and advice on creating your own, you may find the following blogs helpful:

• Five great examples of scenario based learning
• How to create scenario based learning experiences
• Scenario based learning in virtual environments

What is online training for employees?

As many businesses have learnt in a post-pandemic digital age, online training or elearning for employees is becoming increasingly essential. Online training courses and apps not only help workers to advance their knowledge base and stay up-to-date with industry standards, but also provide a really cost-effective way for companies to invest in employee development.

By providing an easy access method of delivering crucial information and skills training, an online training program can enable an organization to prepare personnel for current challenges that could have an impact on operations. 

In the customer service sector, virtual learning environments help employees to practice challenging customer service situations and compliance training with the help of simulations. New employees can familiarize themselves with responsibilities and get to know the workplace premises, whilst current employees can upskill or simply have a refresher session with the help of virtual tours. 

In this blog post, we look at two examples of online training materials presented through interactive and on-demand learning experiences. 

How do you engage employees in online training and learning programs?

The best way to ensure employee engagement is to create highly interactive learning experiences as part of your online course. The experiences need to be high quality and also accessible through your training platform. However the really good news is that you don’t have to invest in expensive employee training software or an elearning platform for your training solutions, or outsource course content production to a third party with the high pricing that goes with it.

Here are two examples of how you can engage employees in online training sessions in customer service. 

1. An example showing highly engaging learning experiences. Enabling employees to practice challenging customer situations with VR Headsets. 

At Gradia vocational institute in Finland, business students get to practice customer service situations using realistic simulations. The elearning environment, using 360 video simulation functionality, was created with ThingLink’s Scenario Builder. This online learning solution is cost-effective, user-friendly and intuitive and supports the development of problem-solving and soft skills across a wide range of training needs and industries. 

Read more about the Gradia elearning environment here.

2. An example of onboarding in a corporate training course: Boosting an online employee training program with virtual tours 

The employee training created by Järvisydän Hotel & Spa Resort in Finland uses virtual tours which allow new employees to get to know the extensive facilities. It is easy to move around the premises virtually and new hires get to know their colleagues by watching the interactive videos in advance. 

Helpful Tip! Using asynchronous materials in the training modules saves time and costs as new employees don’t all have to be in one place at one time. It has also been shown that immersing learners in virtual training simulations in this way improves retention and recall.

Read more about Hotel & Spa Resort Järvisydän’s virtual tours here.

From the embedded scene above, you can explore the demonstration created on the basis of the introductory material. In the actual orientation material, the new employee moves from one facility to another using transitions, exploring the multimedia tags as required.

What are the benefits of using ThingLink to create this type of training?

ThingLink was designed to be fast to learn and easy to master for content creators as well as end users. Should the training materials require updating for any reason, it’s incredibly fast and simple to do. And because the materials are hosted in the cloud, they are updated in real-time, wherever they are embedded – be that on a landing page or in your own LMS (Learning Management System). They can also be used on any device including mobile devices, meaning your employees can access them anywhere.

If you’d like to know more about creating this type of learning material for your students or elearners, please get in touch today!

Your new employees won’t lose their way with this brilliant new feature. Our new navigation functionality is available now to improve online training experiences and orientation activities, perfect for new hires.

High-quality workplace simulations with multimedia hotspots became increasingly popular in corporate training /  online learning courses during the pandemic. Interactive and accessible ways of showcasing a place, space or situation have continued to increase in popularity, because they are proven to be highly effective. 

What can online training for employees be used for?

We’ve seen a real surge in immersive tour type training content created for online courses or elearning, particularly in essential compliance training for onboarding new employees or as a refresher activity. In employee training, interactive workplace simulations are seen as cost and time saving assets enabling organizations to be more efficient and effective.

We have listened and acted upon suggestions from our elearning / employee training training courses customers and providers. Our latest update enables you to add an interactive floor plan or ‘mini map’ that shows the exact location of the view on the simulation or tour. 

An example of online employee training

Check out this demonstration of a multimedia workplace (factory construction site ‘digital twin’ created with Unity) example used in online training below and here. What’s really nice is you can also click on the hotspots directly on the floor plan to transition to that scene / factory floor area.

How to create online training like this

To try this feature, create your own floor plan as a base image for a scene and add your 360 multimedia scenes using the Tour Tag. Then simply add your floor plan scene ID in the settings panel. Read more in our brilliant walkthrough support article

Many elearning or online based training courses are specifically designed to be completed as stand alone, on-demand learning experiences. Our improved functionality can increase the effectiveness of employee engagement in elearning / online training leading to better information or skills retention.

It’s so easy to create your own online training!

The ease of the authoring experience has been noted as a stand out feature of ThingLink. Once created your simulation or virtual tour can be embedded into your learning management system (LMS) or training platform. It can also be used in scenario based learning with branching questions creating gamification. Your training materials can be viewed on any platform or mobile device, meaning they can be accessed anywhere and anytime.

Links to other great articles about using virtual tours in elearning / online training courses.

• Ten reasons to get ThingLink’s elearning solution
• Learn how to create interactive content 
• Create impactful employee training programs with scenario based learning
• Five great examples of interactive online content
• How to create virtual tours
• Onboarding ideas – online employee training sessions
• What are ‘Soft skills’? ThingLink to demonstrate Meta Skills
• Scenario based learning for corporate training
• Ideas for learning programs 
• ThingLink integrations and apps that can be embedded
• ThingLink free Certified Creator Course – An example of training modules in action

Our latest ThingLink update enables you to add a floor plan or ‘mini map’ that shows the exact location of where you are on the 360-degree tour!

Virtual tours with embedded hotspots are increasingly popular, and uses soared during the pandemic in so many different ways. These highly interactive and accessible ways of showcasing a place, space or situation have continued to increase in popularity. 

We’ve seen a real surge in virtual tours created for real estate, interactive games by educators, holiday homes, virtual schools, transitions, campus tours and staff development, particularly essential training for onboarding new employees.

In fact, real estate professionals and potential buyers see virtual tours as an essential part of the purchase process now.  In learning and development training, virtual tours or interactive 360-degree images are seen as cost and time saving assets enabling organizations to be more efficient and effective.

Check out this brilliant virtual tour example featuring our new floor plan feature here, simply enter! What’s really nice about this is you can also click on the hotspots directly on the floor plan to transition to that scene / room.

Virtual tour quick and easy instructions!

Tour creation: To try this feature, you can create your own floor plan as a base image for a scene and add your 360 media scenes using the Tour Tag. Then simply add your floor plan scene ID in the settings panel. Read more in our brilliant walkthrough support article

Are you looking for a new virtual tour platform? ThingLink was the Best Rated Virtual Tour Software of 2022. It is the quickest and easiest virtual tour creator. Get started for free today. Once you’ve created your tour simply share or embed in your preferred place, social media or website! 

Discover more about virtual reality and virtual tours in our post with great examples

How do I create a Virtual Tour? Quick and easy tutorial to create tours. 

Where can I see some examples? View great examples of virtual tours here

How do I make a high-quality virtual tour with my phone? You can create 360-degree images with (e.g  Insta360) or without a 360 degree camera.

NEW! The easy way to create 360 images: Pano to 360

Creating virtual tours, exhibitions, escape rooms and other immersive content just got even easier! ThingLink has now launched Pano to 360 by ThingLink: an easy way to create a 360 photosphere from a panoramic image using any smartphone. For more information, including step-by-step instructions see this helpful support article.