Asynchronous Learning

For many students, the relative low commitment of asynchronous delivery is its greatest asset – this delivery mode is well suited to postgraduate students with experience in university education, professionals working towards accreditation, and full-time workers studying part time. However, while asynchronous learning does offer a great deal of flexibility, it is also easy for your students to disengage from, and only spend an hour or so a week thinking about.

As such, ensuring learning activities are engaging, interactive, and purposeful is both critical to your students’ learning and respectful of their time.

• Ownership – Giving your students ownership over their learning can help engagement. If running Discussion Forums, consider appointing a weekly ‘Discussion Leader’, whose role is to kickstart the conversation and ask questions of their peers.
• Interactive – Quizzes, timelines, or short response questions in response to reading, or embedded into a prerecorded lecture, can help improve your students’ engagement with the material.
• Groupwork – Providing your students with opportunities to work together can help improve engagement and instill a sense of responsibility over their and their peer’s learning. Annotating text together, maintaining a group Padlet or Google Doc, or returning a group-sourced solution to a weekly discussion problem can help your students work together.
• Digital Platforms – Engaging digital platforms such as Mentimeter and Google Arts and Culture can give your students something new and different to play around in, or offer a more anonymous platform to share responses with fear of 'being wrong'.

When designing activities for asynchronous delivery, be sure to consider the ‘point’ of the activity, the clarity of instructions and purpose, and how you will provide feedback.

Additionally, being transparent and honest with your students about both your expectations for their engagement and what you can be flexible on helps give your students further structure and best fit their studies into their lives.

Studying online and at their own pace, asynchronous students can often feel isolated from the rest of the student cohort, which can lead to disengaging from their studies. Building a sense of belonging and community in your unit can go a long way to helping these students feel like they belong, which in turns, encourages them to engage and learn.

Some methods of helping your students develop a sense of belonging include:

• Shared Tasks – Asking your students to work in small groups or pairs can promote a sense of ownership and responsibility over their learning, and help them build connections in their cohort.
• Peer Engagement – Encourage the co-creation of knowledge between your students. Providing opportunities for your students to do something as simple as develop a collaborative document of notes on the weekly readings can create community amongst the cohort.
• Collaboration – Enable, identify, and/or support collaborative spaces and efforts. More than any other cohort, you may need to work with your asynchronous students to build a space they want to engage with.

Your role as an educator of an asynchronous cohort is not just to deliver content and grade assessment but cultivate an environment of community and trust where students feel welcome and supported in engaging with each other and the material.

Check out our introduction to Cooperative Learning Approaches  for some further insight on building belonging through group-work.

Asynchronous does not mean autonomous, anonymous, or automated. Students studying asynchronously require engagement and input just like any other. This can be achieved through several means:

• Weekly Updates – An email outlining the content and activities of the week and/or a temperature check for how students are progressing and managing helps keeps online students involved. Delivering these updates as a short video message can help break down the barrier between you and your students.
• Engagement – Your presence in Discussion Forums – whether it leading discussions, leaving comments or notes in groupwork materials, or asking questions of students – is a simple way to help your students see that you are engaged in their learning.
• Curation – Material need not be developed uniquely for asynchronous students, but it does need to be curated for their delivery method and needs. Porting a face-to-face activity into an online forum without consideration for the change in medium will often be met with poor engagement!
• Availability – You may wish to offer optional synchronous meetings over Zoom or similar, to give your students the opportunity to chat 1-on-1.
• Timing – Asynchronous students will often complete work over weekends, when they aren't beholden to their other responsibilities. If your unit does work on a weekly basis, consider offsetting the online delivery to Wednesday-Wednesday, or running each topic for 10 days, so that you can engage with their weekend work of a Monday or Tuesday before the next topic begins.
• Personality – Don’t be afraid to bring your personality into the course and model the engagement you wish to see.

In short, when teaching an asynchronous cohort, one needs to listen and adapt to their student’s behaviours, requests, and engagement, and respond quickly and fluidly. Be clear about your expectations, but allow for flexibility in your students’ engagement, and ask yourself how you will change the activity if students require more time, instruction, or support.