Synch/Asynch teaching methods

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Permalink Reply by Laura Gibbs on October 30, 2007 at 12:01pm

My quick two cents' worth, from personal experience: there is not enough discussion of RESPONSIVE asynchronous versus asynchronous that has no timeline at all.

What I mean is this: because I teach fulltime online, I am at my computer 40 hours a week, working. This means I respond promptly to student emails, return their assignments as quickly as possible, keep an eye on their blogs (thanks to RSS). This is VERY important to effective learning and it also just makes a big difference to the students emotionally.

A swift response in an asynchronous learning environment is TONS better than a face-to-fact class where you "see" the professor but don't get any feedback on your work for weeks at a time.

I refuse to do anything synchronous in my classes: I value my freedom too highly for that, and my students value their freedom too. The asynchronous strategy is perfect.

But at the same time, I hold them to strict weekly deadlines - they can work up to two weeks early (which is fantastic because they can give themselves two weeks off if they want anytime just by working two weeks ahead), but the deadlines do mean they cannot fall behind! Just as they have deadlines, I do, too - I consider it a very serious duty to respond to them always in a timely fashion.

When teachers are not online fulltime, and not at their computers for their work hours each week, it makes it very hard to be so responsive - and without a high level of teacher responsiveness, the asynchronous strategy loses a lot of its effectiveness, I think!

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Permalink Reply by Chris Davison on October 31, 2007 at 3:51am

Hi Laura, Thanks for your reply. My initial thread was based on my experiences of a mixture of in-school synchronous (or using technologies such as Virtual Classroom to connect disparate schools) and out of school asynchronous teaching/learning. It was great to hear of your methodology of remote teaching, which seems to be working well. By empowering your students, you have moved away from the 'spoonfeeding' that I feel is rife in schools. I think your method of teahcing reflects how people naturally learn in today's information economy, and I applaud your approach. Obviously the students need a degree of motivation (as do all students to be fair), but you seem to have struck a good balance between learning objectives/discipline/motivation. I think you raise some excellent points surrounding responsiveness, and how powerful rapid response can be.

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Permalink Reply by Laura Gibbs on October 31, 2007 at 7:27am

I'll be curious to see what other contributions show up here in the discussion (I hope there will be more comments because it seems to me hugely important as a topic and one that has not come up in the past few months at least here). My experience with the 'blended' approach was not good, and with synchronous online was also not good - just for myself personally, it kind of felt like finally learning to "let go" of the assumptions I had had about education all my life (that it's some kind of mystical synchronous thing), and kind of take the plunge into the asynchronous rabbit hole. I was prepared for my first 100% online course to fail completely and just do it as a one-semester experiment, but even when it was bad (I made a lot of big mistakes the first couple of years, ha ha), the asynchronous fully online class was BETTER than the experiences I had in the classroom and with synchronous conferencing tools... it seems like the blending just allows people to hang on instead of taking the plunge. That's how it was for me, anyway. Very very very rarely I meet up a student who doesn't do well in the online environment and I wonder, "Hmmmm, would they do better in something synchronous?"... and I usually conclude, just guessing of course, that the issues these struggling students are facing in their learning are pretty serious ones, not easily remedied just by seeing a face in a crowd - they would certainly benefit from one-on-one tutoring and truly being befriended by a teacher, but that's not what happens in a crowded classroom anyway... :-)

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Permalink Reply by Chris Davison on November 1, 2007 at 7:33am

More interesting points Laura. I think that many people are of the opinion that online teaching is not personal enough, and that the face to face attention that students would miss out on would be detrimental to their education. However, your points re. responding rapidy to student concerns and the fact that crowded classrooms do not provide a good environment for personal needs to be met, are entirely valid. You could even argue that a classroom environment provides greater opportunities to misbehave, due to students 'showing off' or trying to prove a point to friends. I am involved in an interesting thread from the main forums page, that I think you could definately add value to. The theme surrounds what would happen if we were to do away with school buildings, and how much funding would be freed up for a new educational system. I would encourage you to have a look and add your 2 cents worth! http://classroom20.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=649749%3ATopic%3A68880

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Permalink Reply by Laura Gibbs on November 1, 2007 at 8:55am

great! thanks for the tip - keeping up with the ning here is a bit here or miss depending on what days I have time to really plow through the feeds! :-)

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