From expertise to teaching: helping specialists share what they know

I regularly speak with academic leaders and L&D teams who share the same concern: how can we effectively support field professionals when we ask them to teach?

It is a reality in both companies and higher education: more and more training sessions are delivered by job-role experts or research profiles who are not necessarily trained to teach.

Yet mastering a topic is not enough to make it accessible and enable real learning. Designing a structured session, sustaining learners’ attention, encouraging constructive exchanges: these are skills that do not come automatically. At Wooclap, we believe teaching is something you learn, but it can also be equipped. And that is exactly what we provide through a tool designed to support anyone responsible for sharing knowledge and practice with a group, even when teaching is not their job.

Helping specialists teach: a key challenge for pedagogical and L&D leaders

For pedagogical leaders and L&D directors, it is often difficult to build the skills of these contributors, who may have limited availability and little exposure to best practices in teaching. This is particularly true when the goal is to harmonize learning experiences across an entire program or to guarantee a certain level of quality.

In some contexts, training in teaching methods is planned or being considered, with a genuine desire to support contributors in their teaching role. But a one-off session is not always enough to create lasting change.

This is where a tool like Wooclap makes sense: it helps people adopt the right habits, stimulates interaction, strengthens session structure, and allows facilitators to adjust their delivery in real time, while remaining easy to use. The goal is not to become a learning-engineering specialist, but to provide the right supports to share expertise effectively, grounded in cognitive science.

Beyond ergonomics, Wooclap is built on proven principles. We draw on the work of Stanislas Dehaene, who identifies four fundamental pillars of learning: attention, active engagement, feedback on errors, and consolidation.

Wooclap questions make it possible to act on these pillars, for example by sustaining attention throughout a session, creating breaks in the flow of speech, prompting action, and regularly involving learners. A multiple-choice question or a word cloud, used at the right moment, can significantly strengthen a group’s engagement. And above all, these activities can be used easily by anyone who is in a teaching situation, as long as they have Wooclap.

The Cegos case: “The best tool is the one you don’t need a manual for.”

This quote comes from Fabienne Bouchut, Innovation Project Manager at Cegos, the European leader in skills development, where one of the key challenges is supporting job-role experts. Each year, Cegos mobilizes hundreds of contributors with diverse expertise to run training sessions, in person or remotely, for groups of various sizes. The company wanted to provide them with a consistent facilitation framework while preserving their pedagogical freedom. With Wooclap, it found a tool that is easy to deploy, capable of stimulating active engagement, and ultimately strengthening the impact of every training session.

Since 2021, more than 30,000 events have been created with the tool, generating nearly 2 million interactions and improving the learning experience by helping facilitators put teaching principles into action.

As Bertrand Déroulède, Project Manager at Cegos, humorously summarizes: “It’s a great tool for lazy people.” Behind the joke is a simple reality: Wooclap suits those who do not have the time, and not always the desire, to dive into a new tool.

Wooclap’s workspace is designed to let everyone get started quickly, with no prior expertise in learning engineering.

The formats available, multiple-choice, drag and drop, word clouds, open-ended questions, more than twenty in total, can be adapted to training objectives, whether for diagnostic, formative assessment, or validation of learning outcomes. Thanks to integration with everyday tools (PowerPoint, Teams, and more), Wooclap fits naturally into the work habits of both job-role users and training teams.

Another key point for Cegos is Wooclap’s ability to generate summaries and track individual progress. For pedagogical leaders, this enables more precise monitoring of learners’ progression and better identification of sticking points, to better support specialists by helping them improve their sessions when needed.

Want to go even further with this pedagogical support?

Wooclap already makes it possible to generate questions in just a few seconds from provided course materials, for example a PowerPoint prepared by a trainer, saving time and making it easier to get started.

Tomorrow, Wooclap will offer new forms of support through artificial intelligence. I am writing this article in April 2025, and our first “WooAgents” are currently in beta testing in some classrooms and training centers. We are developing, together with people who already use Wooclap, assistants capable of guiding users, for example in choosing and wording their questions. These assistants will offer examples, rephrasings, and format suggestions based on training objectives.

In practical terms, a person will be supported at every step: from preparing a session to facilitating it. They will receive help to stimulate discussions, suggest alternative viewpoints, or even kickstart a debate when the room goes silent. For us, AI is not meant to replace the teacher or trainer, but to support them by providing didactic cues they may sometimes be missing.

Conclusion: teaching well means creating the conditions for real learning

Teaching is not improvised, even when you master your field perfectly. By giving everyone the right supports to foster learning, we help experts not only share knowledge, but help learners receive it more effectively and remember it for a long time.

This conviction guides us at Wooclap: it is possible to help anyone who is asked to teach make their sessions more engaging, and therefore higher-quality, while strengthening their confidence in their teaching role, whatever their background.