A lot (though not all) of the training videos at my company had the option to read through text instead of following the slow-speaking narrator. God bless whoever put that in as an option. This was pretty much only the ones that concluded with a test, for obvious reasons.
Where I work, the most important part of the training is the training certificate that you must email to your supervisor to prove you took the training. The online training site opens up the certificate so you can print it after taking the training. In a pop up window that automatically closes a millisecond after it loads. And no, it’s not a browser setting, you can allow all the pop up windows you want, but this particular pop up closes immediately after loading.
Well, no, it’s mostly because the law says you have to do it.
Since I work at a state college, I get these every year as part of the state-mandated training. Our facilities person has a say in what we get assigned, so every year I get to see fun stuff like “Slip and Spill Training”. There’s a total of nine assigned to me this year.
I usually just start the video and then open SDMB (or similar) in another tab, and like the OP go back and click next when the sound ends.
I teach college students a class on effective PowerPoint and how to avoid “Death By PowerPoint”. I ask students if anyone has heard of that term before, and usually a former military person will raise their hand; boy! they had really big complaints about military video training.
Anyway, the game is when you’re watching a really boring slide show, whether online or in person, is to see if you can find all the letters of the alphabet (A-Z) on the slide before they move to the next slide; J, K, Q, and Z are usually the hardest letters to find. If they can find all the letters, especially if they can be found in order from the start to the end of the slide, they win! Plus for an in-person presentation, the presenter thinks you’re really paying attention!
Lawyers have to do a certain number of hours of continuing legal education, and I’m on the committee that creates those trainings for our organization. The state bar requires the sessions to include “substantive written materials,” but contrary to popular belief, they do not require a PowerPoint. I’ve had great success with a one-page outline as a handout (containing the relevant statutes and case law so people don’t have to write them down), and then just talking. People actually look at me and listen to me, and even retain the information. It’s like magic.
We have yearly courses we have to take. They are ponderous and you can’t just read and forward. I find them dull as ditch water.
I was interested to see, though, that after Epstein’s arrest they massively revamped the one on Human Trafficking to acknowledge that it wasn’t just poor people trafficking/paying.
When I was working I attended and presented quite a few seminars.
Powerpoint was king back then and sometimes a presenter would put a slide up and then read everything on the screen. This is pretty much the same thing that the OP describes but at least there was usually a questionnaire to complete after scoring the presentation.
I am a fast reader and much prefer information in written form. The current fashion for podcasts etc doesn’t impress me at all.
I use vignette-based learning with discussion when I actually have a live group. Doesn’t work nearly as well as a static individual unit.
I will no doubt be the only person in this thread who prefers online training. But that’s only because of what I had before - pre-COVID, we had the very same Powerpoints we do now. Instead of being narrated by a disembodied voice, they were either read by the trainer or we went around the room taking turns. For the last ten years or so the “trainer” was the manager- who did not necessarily have any expertise in training. Before that, the training was conducted by “training specialists” and adjunct instructors who often had no subject matter expertise and could not answer any questions that were not addressed on the powerpoint. I still want to know how that was better than me reading the powerpoint.
The last “Safety and Security” video and test I had to take was fifty slides. So while the video buzzed on at 200% speed in a background window (muted, of course), I just went ahead and took the test.
Every single one of the hundred answers was just common sense. Did get one wrong because I answered based on the real world, instead of thinking ‘What would a soulless security company (that uses stock photos of vacant-eyed corporate drones) want me to do?’
Oh Lord, don’t get me started. Every time I go to buy a computer part, electronic device, or anything else that people might review online, and google “[item] reviews”, I’m bombarded with a raft of YouTube videos and sometimes podcasts that are reviews.
Who wants to watch 3+ minutes of half-assedly produced (at best) video with a lot of explanation of what’s actually being shown, just to find out someone’s opinion about a mouse or a cell phone case? I’d MUCH rather have a few paragraphs that I can skim, and then read the final opinion.
But it’s like people can’t read anymore, and prefer to just watch some vapid, moronic, amateurish video rather than just read a paragraph that required someone to actually organize their thoughts and commit them to text, rather than spraying verbal diarrhea for 3 minutes.
And you know it’s going to be verbal diarrhea when it starts with “Hey, how you doin’ today?”
Because you know that’ll be followed by two minutes of “I’m great, kinda chillin’ in my Man Cave Workshop here, just finishing up a ham ‘n’ apple sandwich. Y’know what? I’m going to put my recipe for that in the comments, so check that out. So anyhow, here at “Sleazy Al, Your DIY Pal” we always do product reviews on Thursdays… I had a comment from someone who can never remember that, so I’ll make it easy: think of Throwback Thursdays, and I’ll snark so much on that thing you were gonna buy that you’ll throw it back!” [maniacal laughter, cut short by choking on sandwich]…
Heck, I’d watch that channel just for the laughs! But I get your point.
I work at an international company, and the training videos definitely show it. So many accents, and so much forced “inclusivity” of all the different types of scenarios. I much prefer the cartoon ones.
To pass the time I snapshot each bullet-pointed list and throw it into a powerpoint, to go over when I take the test. Saves me failing and having to go back through the video again. That reminds of of the one test that had a wrong answer on it, and my whole group failed it over and over. They put up a new one this year.
Could be the reason those proliferate is because vendors will give you a $5 gift card for posting a written review, and a $10 gift card for posting a video review.
That’s what Apple offered me when I bought a new charger for my laptop.
Our instructors would go one better. At the beginning of the class we would receive a folder or notebook with a printed version of the entire Powerpoint presentation. Then each slide would be read to us. 
I had a training session like that! AND, each slide should have been five, so it had acres of tiny type that you could barely read, but that’s okay, because Tommy Tortoise would… read it to… us, sen [take a big wheezy breath] tence… by run-on…sentence.
The title of the (mandatory) four hour-long sessions?
“Effective Teaching Styles”…
It’s not the online-ness of the training that most people object to. The OP was complaining about being forced to go through online training at a pace that was much slower than he could naturally absorb. If it lets you go at your own pace, online training has the advantage over in-person training.
I left out a word - I meant to include “narrated” which in my experience never lets you go at your own pace. I still prefer it to my in-person experience, which also never let you go at your own pace.
That’s definitely not Apple that offered that to you.
Fortunately, most trainings these days are done in HTML5 video. Even if the site itself doesn’t allow skipping or fast forwarding, you can install 3rd party extensions in your browser to adjust their playback speed. I up the playback speed to 8x, just fast enough that I can skim the slides and verify I know everything, and a 15 minute training can be done in 2 minutes.
Also useful for video sites that play a block of unskippable ads before videos.
Yeah, well, whoever.