Enhance New Employee Training Efficiency: Create Interactive Courses with ActivePresenter (Step by step)

Last Updated On: June 5, 2025

If you’re wondering about the process of creating an interactive course for new employees to help them better understand company culture, strategic products, or the company’s long-term direction, then this article is for you.

In this article, I will guide you step-by-step on how to leverage ActivePresenter’s capabilities to quickly and effectively create onboarding courses for new company employees. Creating interactive courses for new employees will help your company save significant costs while enhancing training effectiveness compared to traditional training methods.

Before you begin, don’t forget to download and install ActivePresenter, our powerful eLearning authoring tool for teachers and trainers, on your computer! It’s completely free to download and install. No credit card required.

Step 1: Building the Foundation – Planning and Outlining Content

Before opening ActivePresenter, the most crucial step is meticulous planning. Consider it as creating the blueprint for your new employee onboarding journey. This step is extremely important as it will determine the time, personnel, and costs you’ll need to create a successful course.

• Define clear learning objectives: What exactly should your new employees know and be able to do after completing the course? Be specific and measurable. For example, instead of “understand company culture,” aim for “identify and articulate the company’s core values.”
• Break it down: Identify key onboarding topics: Onboarding has many facets. Divide it into logical, digestible modules. Consider these potential areas:
  • Welcome and Company Overview: Your company’s history, mission, values, and overall culture.
  • Team and Department Introductions: Who’s who and how different teams collaborate.
  • Essential Policies and Procedures: HR guidelines, work protocols, inter-departmental communication standards.
  • Job-Specific Training: Tasks, responsibilities, and necessary skills specific to the employee’s role.
  • Tools and Technology: Software, platforms, and internal systems.
  • Information Security and Safety: Regulations, ethics, and workplace safety.
• Gather your resources: Collect all existing documents, presentations, videos, and any other relevant materials. Having everything in one place will streamline the content creation process.
• Create a coherent structure: Arrange your topics in a logical flow. Think about a natural progression of information, starting with the basics and gradually moving to more specific details.
• Plan your assessments: How will you gauge understanding? Will you use quizzes, knowledge checks after each module, or interactive scenarios? Decide on your assessment methods early on.

Your course doesn’t necessarily have to include all the information above, as each company will have different requirements for its employees.

Step 2: Setting Up Your Project in ActivePresenter

Now it’s time to dive into ActivePresenter and set up your project. Based on the information identified in Step 1, you can start creating your project with ActivePresenter software. There are many ways to begin, but to save time, you can leverage the pre-built course templates available in ActivePresenter.

With over 15 years of experience in training content creation, ActivePresenter’s library of sample courses is quite comprehensive for various purposes. You can explore more demo projects here!

After selecting a sample project to start with, don’t forget to redesign the theme, project size, and even convert the project from a single platform to a responsive design. This is an important step as it will determine your course publishing options later. 

Step 3: Bringing Content to Your Course – Integrating Content and Media

After you’ve created a blank project with ActivePresenter, it’s time to bring your content into the course. This is where your onboarding content comes to life. With ActivePresenter, you have many different options for creating training content, such as:

• Screen Recording: This is an extremely useful feature for creating software tutorial videos, workflow demonstrations, or any computer-based operations. You can record the entire screen, a specific region, a particular application window, or your webcam. ActivePresenter allows you to professionally edit recorded videos, add annotations, zoom-in/out effects, cut, merge, and much more.
• Audio Recording: You can record voice-overs directly into your lessons, helping to convey information more clearly and vividly. ActivePresenter supports audio editing, noise removal, and volume adjustment.
• Insert Video and Audio: Besides direct recording, you can also easily insert existing video and audio files into your lessons. This is very convenient if you already have high-quality multimedia resources.
• Insert Images: Images play an important role in illustrating content and making lessons more visual. ActivePresenter supports various image formats and allows you to customize size, position, and add effects.
• Create Slides: You can freely design slides with text, images, shapes, and other objects. Similar to PowerPoint, but ActivePresenter is even more powerful in creating complex interactions and scenarios.
• Add Interactive Questions: This is a standout strength of ActivePresenter. You can add various question types such as Multiple Choice, Fill in Blanks, Drag-n-Drop, True/False, and many others to assess employee knowledge. These questions make the course more interactive and keep learners engaged.
• Create interactive games to make your employees more interested in the learning process.

By flexibly combining these options, you can create onboarding courses for employees that not only provide information but are also engaging, interactive, and effective.

Step 4: Packaging Your Course with ActivePresenter

Once you have finished creating content, editing, and adding interactions to your course in ActivePresenter, the final step is to export it into suitable formats for distribution. ActivePresenter supports various output formats, giving you flexibility in sharing your lessons. Each format is suitable for specific training purposes and publishing platforms. ActivePresenter offers a variety of formats, but you’ll need to decide which one to choose. Below is a list of formats and our advice.

HTML5:

• Description: This is the most popular and recommended publishing format for modern eLearning courses. HTML5 allows your course to run smoothly on most web browsers and mobile devices (computers, tablets, smartphones) without needing any additional plugins.
• Advantages: Cross-platform compatibility, full support for interactions, questions, and multimedia. Optimized for user experience on all devices.
• Use when: You want to distribute the course online via a website, Learning Management System (LMS), or email for users to view directly in their browser.

SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model):

• Description: SCORM is an international standard for packaging eLearning content. When publishing to SCORM, ActivePresenter will create a ZIP file package containing your course along with learner progress tracking information (e.g., scores, learning time, completion status).
• Advantages: High compatibility with most LMSs (Learning Management Systems) like Moodle, Blackboard, Canvas, etc. Helps you effectively track and manage learners’ learning progress.
• Use when: You need to integrate the course into an LMS to track learner activity, evaluate results, and manage the course professionally. ActivePresenter supports SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004.

xAPI (Experience API) / Tin Can API:

• Description: xAPI is a newer standard than SCORM, more flexible, and allows for tracking a wider variety of learning experiences, not just limited to traditional LMSs.
• Advantages: More detailed tracking capabilities, can record learning activities that occur both outside the LMS (e.g., learning on mobile apps, offline learning).
• Use when: You need to track more complex and diverse learning experiences, or when your LMS supports xAPI.

Video:

• Description: ActivePresenter allows you to export your course in popular video formats such as MP4, AVI, WMV, WebM, MKV. Interactions and questions will be “recorded” as video and will no longer be interactive.
• Advantages: Easy to share via video platforms (YouTube, Vimeo), playable on any device with a video player.
• Use when: You want to create a tutorial video or a video lecture for wide distribution without needing to track interactions or scores. Suitable for presentation-style or demonstration courses.

PDF / Microsoft Word / Microsoft Excel Documents:

• Description: You can export the content of your slides into PDF, Word, or Excel documents. Text and image content will be converted to document format, usually for printing or offline reading.
• Advantages: Easy to print, distribute reading materials, or provide reference documents for learners.
• Use when: You want to provide a summary, supplementary learning materials, or a printable version of the course.

PowerPoint Document (Microsoft PowerPoint):

• Description: ActivePresenter allows you to export slides to PowerPoint format (.pptx), retaining most of the content and formatting.
• Advantages: Convenient if you need to make further edits in PowerPoint or want to use the slides for a live presentation.
• Use when: You already have a PowerPoint presentation and want to import those slides into ActivePresenter to enrich them, or conversely, want to export content from ActivePresenter to PowerPoint.

Step 5: Releasing Your Course

After creating, editing, and packaging your course with ActivePresenter, it’s time to deliver it to your learners. The course release method will depend on the infrastructure your company uses:

• Release via Learning Management System (LMS) If your company already has an internal LMS (like Moodle, Canvas, SharePoint LMS, or a custom platform), this is the top recommended option.
  • Upload SCORM/xAPI package: Upload the course package published in SCORM format (version 1.2 or 2004) or xAPI (Tin Can API) that you created in Step 4. These formats allow the LMS to closely track learners’ progress, scores, and interactive activities. This is extremely useful for management, evaluating training effectiveness, and issuing certificates later.
  • Benefits: Ensures professionalism, easy learner management, detailed report tracking, and seamless integration into the company’s training process.
• Release Without an LMS In case your company doesn’t have an LMS or only needs to quickly distribute courses that don’t require close tracking:
  • HTML5: If you’ve published in HTML5 format, you can upload the entire HTML5 folder to a web server or simply share these files via email or cloud storage services. Users just need to open the index.html file with a web browser to view the course. However, you won’t be able to track their progress automatically.
  • Video: For courses published as videos (MP4, AVI, etc.), you can upload them to video-sharing platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, or store them on Google Drive, Dropbox, and share the link. This method is very simple for distribution but also limits interactivity and tracking.

Save Your ActivePresenter Project

One extremely important thing I want to emphasize is: Always store your original ActivePresenter project file (.approj) in a safe place. Don’t forget to store the ActivePresenter project and all its data in the same location. By saving your project properly, you can easy edit them in the future. There are many advantages of doing so:

• Easy editing: The .approj file contains all the layers, objects, effects, and interactive logic you’ve built. If you later need to update content, fix errors, or add new features, having the original project file will help you make all changes easily and quickly.
• Avoid redoing from scratch: If you only keep the published files (HTML5, SCORM, Video) without the project file, you’ll have to start over if you want to make significant edits.

Note: Name your project files clearly, with versions (e.g., OnboardingCourse_v1.approj, OnboardingCourse_v2.approj) for easy management.

Conclusion

With ActivePresenter’s powerful features and intuitive interface, you can easily and quickly create a new employee training course.

Are you ready to elevate your onboarding process? Download the free ActivePresenter trial today and start creating engaging learning experiences for your new team members!