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Software testing is a business-critical process used by private and public organizations and an important source of market competitiveness. Employees of these organizations are facing tough competition and are required to be able to maintain and develop their skills and knowledge in software testing. In the education market, many commercial courses and certifications are available for industrial engineers who wish to improve their skills in software development. Nevertheless, there is a lack of access to world-leading research within the software testing field in these commercial courses that supports the companies’ innovation in software testing. As an alternative, universities are approaching this challenge by developing academic courses on software testing that can suit professionals who need to be able to combine work and studies. This study highlights several good approaches and challenges in developing and teaching three distance web-based software testing courses targeting test practitioners. The proposed approaches for enhancing teaching of software testing in an online setting for industrial practitioners are: active participation at the student’s pace, inclusion of software testing artifacts from the student’s organization as part of assignments, continuous access to online materials, the use of short video materials on testing theory, and setting clear expectations for performing online test design assignments. Finally, several challenges have been identified: poor feedback on assignments, distances between students and teachers, the use of non-realistic assignments and the difficulty for industrial practitioners to complete academic assignments each week. Future work is needed to explore these results in practice, for example on how to shorten distances between students and teachers, as well as how to enhance the inclusion of real-world testing artifacts in course assignments. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.