25 August 2025
How to Make the Shift to Online Learning (Without Losing Engagement)
Natalie Ann Holborow
Content Marketing Manager
Perhaps you’ve been running face-to-face training for years. You know the routine off by heart and can read the room, decode the body language and spark conversations that inspire. Now imagine your organisation is going hybrid or entirely remote. Or perhaps budgets are tighter, or you simply need to reach a larger audience as the business expands.
In our conversations with L&D professionals, one of the most frequently cited concerns about transitioning from face-to-face to digital learning is that learner engagement will decline.
So, how do you transition to digital learning successfully, without compromising on learner engagement?
Causes for a lack of engagement with digital learning
The global e-learning market size was worth around USD 231.93 billion in 2024 and is predicted to grow to around USD 1086.07 billion by 2034. With 99% of organisations now providing e-learning to their employees (in contrast to just 76% only five years ago), the e-learning industry shows no signs of slowing down.
At the Learning Technologies Digital Experience in 2022, Sukhvinder Pabial highlighted several bad practices that have hampered moving to digital learning since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Some of his examples included:
A ‘lift and shift’ approach to moving learning online
L&D becoming ‘overnight experts’ in areas such as virtual training or wellbeing
Lack of consideration for digital content
Dismissing good collaboration tools
Other common culprits for online learner drop-off include:
A lack of peer learning opportunities
Long, lecture-style videos
Limited feedback or support
Tech fatigue and distraction
Feeling ‘out on your own’ without a learning community
When Australia’s universities moved online during the pandemic, overall learner engagement dropped to just 43.2% (down from 59.9% in 2019). This is a significant decline that illustrates what happens when content is quickly moved online without careful planning.
The good news, however, is that all of the causes of low learner engagement online are fixable.
How to keep learners engaged online
At Synergy Learning, we’ve helped more than 1,000 organisations make the shift to online learning over the past 20 years. We have noticed a consistent pattern: learner engagement thrives when learning is active, social, relevant, and supported. Here are our top tips for making the switch to digital learning a success, addressing the key challenges we hear most often.
1. “Our learners won’t be motivated if they’re not in the room.”
Humans learn better together. Albert Bandura’s social learning theory (1977) emphasises the importance of observing, modelling and imitating the behaviours, attitudes and emotional reactions of others. In face-to-face settings, learners benefit from the presence of social cues, peer energy and opportunities for collaboration. Online, there’s a risk that this can disappear, which can rapidly erode motivation.
One of the biggest challenges of online learning is isolation, so you need the right tools to facilitate social learning remotely. Today’s learning management systems – such as Totara and Moodle – enable you to bring people together on one central platform to solve problems, recommend resources and share what’s working.
A good first step is to set up communities of practice around shared roles, themes or challenges. Provide people with a space where they can chat openly, trade resources, discuss solutions and provide feedback. You’ll be amazed at how the conversations take off when people connect with intention. Totara’s workspaces feature works well for this.
Introduce some live touchpoints, too. While flexibility and asynchronicity are key benefits of online learning, tools like BigBlueButton provide a way to deliver live, interactive sessions along with breakout rooms for focused collaboration. Schedule classes, track attendance and engagement and connect learning activities effortlessly – all while keeping your focus on the learners. Combined with video check-ins with line managers and/or coaches, connecting with intention is an effective way to help learners feel supported and motivated to learn.
2. “We don’t have the budget for an online learning rollout.”
L&D budgets are often tight, particularly in industries such as the non-profit and public sectors. Moving online can sound like a huge investment upfront, especially if you’re imagining slick custom videos, shiny new platforms and specialist instructional designers. Many L&D teams fear that the cost will outweigh the benefit.
There are some ways to do this without burning through your budget (and if you work in the public or non-profit sectors, we’ve got guides for this specific challenge).
Firstly, you don’t have to go all-in at the start. Start small and scale – we recommend piloting one or two high-impact courses online before committing to a full rollout. If you can repurpose existing in-person materials into microlearning or have in-house experts, consider recording them speaking on Zoom instead of hiring a whole production crew.
Secondly, if you want standout branding but don’t want the cost of a fully-bespoke theme, our Spark LMS theme has been designed exclusively for Synergy Learning customers. Using our experience of delivering more than 1,200 learning platforms, we’ve equipped Spark with useful integrations, the highest standards of UX design and premium add-ons that reflect our most frequently requested custom features. Choose functionality that wows your users without the expense of developing a custom theme.
Finally, demonstrate ROI early. Research shows that well-designed online training can reduce time to competency by 40-60% compared to classroom learning, while delivering consistent quality across large audiences (Brandon Hall). That’s a cost saving you can take straight to your CFO.
3. “It’ll be too complex to integrate with other systems.”
When you’re used to booking a training room and printing handouts, the idea of juggling platforms, logins and IT requests can sound exhausting. The worry is that you’ll spend more time managing the system than delivering high-quality training programmes.
However, today’s learning management systems are designed to take the work off your plate rather than add to it. The right platform will:
- Integrate seamlessly with your HR, CRM or comms tools so learner data flows automatically (and you’re not spending hours chasing spreadsheets).
- Centralise everything into one easy-to-use platform; whether that’s your courses, resources, live session links or progress tracking.
- Automate your admin – from enrolments and reminders to certificates and reporting – so you can focus on learning outcomes instead of sifting through files.
The best part is that you don’t have to set this all up yourself. A good LMS partner will handle the heavy lifting on setup, connect your existing systems and help train up your team so you can hit the ground running. Check out our case studies to see how we’ve done this for our customers.
Ready to switch from face-to-face to online learning?
Well-designed online learning can actually be more flexible, inclusive, scalable and engaging than traditional face-to-face training. Online training doesn’t kill engagement – poorly designed learning does.
Remember, keep it social, active, digestible and make sure your learners are fully supported by connecting them to others.
Want to see how this can work for you? Book a demo and we’ll show you what you can achieve with the Synergy Learning team – then watch learner engagement soar.
