Skip to main content

Sometimes students can’t all meet in the classroom, for all sorts of reasons—but they can still have an opportunity to engage with course material. It’s useful to think about using the online space as adaptation to a new kind of classroom rather than a translation from the physical classroom. Skilled faculty take advantage of the affordances of the online space (Supiano, 2020). In what follows, we provide strategies and techniques for engaging students specifically in the asynchronous modality.

Understanding Asynchronous v. Synchronous Engagement

Definitions

Supporting our students’ engagement in our courses is crucial, as it leads to behaviors and dispositions known to increase student learning. In particular, levels of engagement impact students’ sense of belonging, levels of motivation and achievement, and levels of enjoyment (Frisby et al., 2014; MacLeod, Yang, and Shi, 2019). And yet phenomena like Zoom fatigue mean that long stretches of uninterrupted lecture or even class discussion do not always work well in a virtual format. Using Zoom features like Breakout Rooms, Chat and other online collaborative tools can help synchronous sessions succeed. But how can you also use asynchronous activities to engage students in new ways—and how do you know what you should do synchronously and what to do asynchronously?

Allocating Time to Course Activities—How to Decide? What? When?

When does it make sense to work synchronously?

Bringing students together at the same time makes the most sense when we want to take advantage of the benefits of being together in real-time, which include the opportunity to interact and work together in ways that are spontaneous and responsive to the class environment. Speaking and listening are key components of most Georgetown courses; active seminar discussions allow for spontaneous development of ideas that take on a unique choreography that changes moment to moment. Consider how you can foreground these components while you are together on screen.

Synchronous Advantages

When does it make sense to work asynchronously?

Asynchronous work allows students to work at their own pace, reflect and review, and generate material at times when they are ready and at ‘their best.’

Asynchronous Advantages

Contact Time

Of course, if you add asynchronous activities that wouldn’t normally be part of the course when teaching it face to face, you’ll need to consider the time this demands from students (and, of course, from you); if you have a 75-minute class session and you decide to deliver a 30-minute lecture as a recording rather than your usual in-person method of presenting it live in class, you should subtract those thirty minutes from your class session so as not to multiply student work unreasonably. A key question to ask yourself regarding asynchronous activities is: Are the students engaging with the materials with the instructor as mediator?

This formula may help you think through student time demands:

Please see the webpage for more on rethinking contact hours.

Planning your Time

Once you decide what kinds of activities you will engage in as a synchronous group, you can move all your other course engagement to asynchronous types of engagement. A helpful tool to help you view how these different modes interact is a Before/During/After table.

Sample Integration of Asynchronous and Synchronous Activities

Sample integration of Asynchronous and Synchronous Activities

(Note: these activities took place over the course of a week)

Creating Asynchronous Activities

Once you create asynchronous course activities, build in time and space to demonstrate the new tool that students will be using, model how you would like them to engage with it, and allow students to practice before they are asked to perform. This practice will reduce student anxiety (as well as your own!) and increase their levels of engagement. Some helpful advice to keep in mind:

Some tools to consider:

Screenshot of Canvas Quiz

Creating Asynchronous Course Materials

You will likely want to use a mixture of these approaches. Be mindful of how you organize and present the materials with your students. Organizing Canvas course content into Modules is a great way to organize materials and to guide students through content in a specific order just as you would during in-person lectures. Keep the directions clear and always connect the activities to each other.

As with a traditional in-person class, interacting with texts and “gathering” for class remain the primary ways for students to engage with the course synchronously, though how this is accomplished in the online course setting needs attention. You can ensure deep reading and even community-building around texts by implementing:

Opportunities for students to read, analyze, and annotate texts together, such as through Google Draw, SoundCloud, and Panopto also allow students to annotate with multimedia, including images, sound and video files, and hyperlinks to other content.

To create asynchronous course materials, you will want to pre-record at least some (if not all) lectures. But, it is important to remember a few things when it comes to making lecture videos:

To get started with recording your own lecture videos, please consult our tip sheet on Recording Lectures Ahead of Time.

Videos are great when you want to combine your voice with visuals, but if you are looking to just deliver audio content, consider a podcast. Zoom allows you to download the audio tracks of any Zoom meeting, as separate tracks for multiple speakers, which can be used to create a podcast. These can be useful for expert interviews, narratives, panel discussions, or modeling a close reading. Podcasts require less bandwidth than a video, and students can listen to them while doing other mundane tasks or working out, while watching a video usually requires that a student be seated.

In order to make the most of your content delivery, you will probably want to use a mixture of these approaches. Be mindful of how you organize and present the materials with your students. Using Canvas modules is a great way to organize the materials for your students and for you to guide them through it—taking them through the materials in an optimal way, just as you would during in-person lectures. Keep the directions clear and always connect the activities to each other.

Conclusions

As we’ve seen, there are numerous possibilities for fostering significant asynchronous engagement with course content. The literature makes clear that this engagement enhances student learning. Rather than get lost in the weeds or distracted with the novelty of the tools that exist in the online space, work to increase your competence in a small set, and then use the variety of affordances in this set to create multiple and dynamic means for asynchronous engagement. When doing so, remember to create engagement feedback loops—where activities, assignments, course content, and synchronous sessions connect and reinforce one another—take advantage of student engagement in order to assess how they are doing, and design for inclusivity. Then, you can focus remaining synchronous time for activities and experiences whose meaning and value depend on being together at the same time.

Faculty Insight

Bibliography

Back to top arrow_upward