Asynchronous Course Design

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Some considerations about Online Asynchronous Courses

  • Online teaching and learning is still new to many of us, which means patience, repetition, and understanding are useful in supporting students.
  • Because it is new, it may be stressful or feel overwhelming.  Students may be looking for a reason to give it up or to test their boundaries.  Validate the stress and the challenge, but encourage them to think about what they can learn about themselves and how the challenges that online learning represents can help them grow in different ways.  In many ways, asynchronous courses are a good model for them to think about professional work, where there is a lot of learning and self-direction that needs to take place.
  • It’s very easy to slip into the mindset that because a space (e.g. Moodle) is easy to navigate for you, that it is for others.  It’s useful for your own knowledge and for the student’s stress to use curiosity about problems they are running into around online learning, even if they seem self-evident to you (e.g. such as how to access the syllabus or other documents).  These differences might result from different device use (laptop, tablet, smartphone), different systems (PC, MAC), different browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Edge), and different routes into the Moodle

Early Warning Signs of Challenges in Asynchronous Courses

Warning Signs: The student doesn’t access the Moodle class.

Possible Actions:

  1. Include a link to Moodle in your Syllabus and email the syllabus in the days leading up to the course (also included 1-2 sentences about what Moodle is)
  2. Email students who haven’t accessed after the 2nd day with direct link to Moodle and ask them to join the class. 
  3. Email students who haven’t enrolled by the 4th day of classes with direct link and CC’ing their Lab Faculty

Warning Signs: The student accesses the course but doesn’t do anything in the first 4 days. 

Possible Actions: Email/call/text students to check in and see if they have questions or need clarity (maybe also indicate when/what their first assignment is). 

Warning Signs: The student misses first activity or assignment.

Possible Actions: Email/call/text the student to see where there might have been confusion (e.g. some students may think asynchronous online means they do it when they want over the course, rather than in weekly deadlines). 

Warning Signs: The student does first activity but misses key details.

Possible Actions: Outside of traditional feedback mechanism (e.g. Moodle), check in with the student to see what their experience of the assignment was and try to gain understanding about how they might have missed key details (work from an understanding perspective and an opportunity to consider how the activity can be clarified).  When comfortable/possible, provide the student an opportunity to revise/resubmit. 

Warning Signs: The student submits assignments in the wrong places.Possible Actions: Email/call/text the student to let them know and where possible, ask open ended questions about how they are doing with the course.

Additional Consideration and Practices

  1. Make presence know with announcements
    1. Weekly announcements at beginning of the week
      • Highlights from previous week
        1. Key points
        2. Insights from Students (e.g. from discussions)
      • Contours of coming week’s learning
      • Q&A (any questions you get in the week privately that you want others to hear the answer to).
      • Upcoming Due Dates
    2. Notifying that feedback for activities/assignments has been posted
      • Useful general feedback
      • Highlights of interesting things you saw/appreciated
      • Resources that might be helpful
    3. Changes/Updates to the Course
    4. Useful announcements or sharing out interesting items
      • Course relevant content that you come upon
      • Events/opportunities that students might be interested
  2. Reasonable turnaround time 
    1. 24-72 hours for communication depending upon weekly schedule
    2. 1 week or sooner for evaluated assignments or activities
    3. Such times are clearly listed in syllabus and occasional reminders in the course
  3. Providing Feedback
    1. Create opportunities for peer review or early draft review
    2. Consider what feedback is most useful for the students’ learning (i.e. don’t feel the need to identify everything throughout but just those essential).
    3. Highlight the strengths of the students’ work
    4. Whenever possible, provide audio or video feedback; often with textual feedback, it’s hard to discern tone and can sometimes lead people to hear it in the worst light. 
    5. Offering some guidance about what to do with the feedback (to individuals or to all students) can help them move forward with it as a learning process.
  4. Meetings
    1. In initial meetings with students, be sure to learn about who they are and what they want and need out of the course.
      • Where possible, adjust the course accordingly or their individual learning plan
      • As questions that allow them to make connections between their goals and the course
    2. Find a way of sharing highlights from the conversation such as:
      • Follow up email with highlights
      • Google Doc that you share with them of notes and next steps
      • Ask the student to collaborate in note-taking and both of you write down and share thoughts
    3. Ask the student what you can do to help them succeed.
    4. Ask the student what might be signs that they are aware of that they might be struggling or needing more support. Frame it as something that can be hard to tell in an online course so that you ask because it may look different for everyone.