Online Creativity Training: Examining the Effectiveness of a Comprehensive Training Approach

In today's rapidly changing and technology-driven world, the ability to think creatively is essential for individuals and organizations. To date, technology-based training has become a new trend for learning and training in the 21st century; however, little empirical research has been conducted to enhance creativity through online training. In the current study, we developed and examined an online creativity training program, which employed a comprehensive training approach and consisted of twenty self-instructional exercises delivered throughout five weeks. The effectiveness of the training was examined by means of a pre-posttest between-subjects design with two control groups (i.e., a creativity-unrelated online memory training; no-training). Four well-validated tasks tapping onto divergent and convergent thinking were used to measure participants' creativity. Upon following the online creativity training, participants' performance tended to significantly improve on several indices of divergent thinking (e.g., fluency, flexibility, originality). For the two control groups, no difference in divergent thinking was observed between the pretest and posttest. Besides, no training effects were observed on convergent thinking. The current findings increase our understanding of enhancing creativity through online training and provide a new comprehensive training approach, which may contribute to the enhancement of creativity in educational and organizational settings.