Balancing Synchronous and Asynchronous Teaching: Effective Strategies for Enhancing Flexibility without Losing Student Engagement

Asynchronous learning opportunities are effective for activities where:

• You want students to access materials, readings, assignments, and assessments at their own pace (with clear deadlines and check-in points, specified by the instructor)

• Students are learning new content or skills, and you want to give students time to process the information, check their understanding, reflect on their learning, and practice their skills before engaging in activities or assessments (e.g., discussion forums, quizzes, assessments)

• Students are collaborating with peers or reviewing each other’s work

Share Content

Consider various options for sharing content that align with your learning outcomes, the type of content you’re teaching, and the needs of your students. The following questions will help guide your decision making about effective asynchronous methods to share your content:

• Text, audio, or video: What’s the best way for students to learn the content? Do students need visual aids (e.g., whiteboard demonstrations, images, animations, narrated demonstrations)? Do students need audio aids (e.g., narration, music)? You can present your content using a single method, a combination of two, or all three.
• Curate vs. create: What can be curated from existing digital content? What content is unique to your particular course and needs to be created?

Engage Students in their Learning

In your face-to-face course, how did you ensure that students were engaging with and understanding the content? For example, did you pause to ask questions, use quizzes, ask students to talk about their ideas with a neighbour, or facilitate class discussions? How can you adjust these strategies for the remote environment? The following suggestions can support student engagement and learning with the content.

Before students engage with the content

• Provide a framework or set of prompts that help students focus on what they should learn from the content. Students can reflect on their answers, or submit them through a poll, survey, collaborative document, or discussion forum. For example:
  • Key questions (e.g., “After watching this video, you should be able to answer the following questions…”; “Questions to consider while reading…”)
  • Provide a series of true/false statements that students respond to before and after reading or viewing the content

While students engage with the content

• Embed opportunities for engagement in your videos/podcasts/readings (e.g., questions that students should answer or skills that students should practice before moving forward)
• Encourage students to collaboratively annotate the readings (e.g., using a tool like hypothes.is, see this overview of Hypothes.is with possible uses in different disciplines)
• Encourage students to make collaborative notes. Create notetaking teams (groups of 3-5 students) and provide a structure for the week’s notes in a shared Google Doc. Ask student groups to assign sections of the notes to each member (Example from a history course)
• Incorporate asynchronous active learning techniques, including polling, minute papers, and concept mapping (see p. 18-28 of our Adapting your Teaching and Learning Activities guide)

After students engage with the content

Provide opportunities for students to:

• check their understanding (e.g., low-stakes practice quizzes at the end of a video/module/week)
• reflect on their learning (e.g., learning journals/logs, reflections, student responses to the key question prompts given before engaging with the content)
• apply or extend their understanding
  • apply the content to a scenario or case study
  • curate effective online resources that teach or extend the topic (e.g., images, GIFs, memes, TED talks, YouTube videos, websites)
  • develop materials to teach the content to their peers (text, audio, video)

Build Community and Connection

• Have students introduce themselves in a discussion forum using a short video, text, and/or images, and including an audio pronunciation of their name. Also post your own introduction.
• Clearly explain to students how they can contact you and when you will hold office hours. Reach out to students who are not participating.
• Use discussion forums effectively (see p. 27-28 of our Adapting your Teaching and Learning Activities guide)

Additional Resources

• Actively Engaging Students in Asynchronous Online Classes
• Asynchronous Strategies for Inclusive Teaching

Synchronous learning opportunities are effective for activities where:

• Students are learning content that requires a live discussion or real-time debate
• Students need to work through problems, questions, or content together in real time with the instructor present to provide support and respond to questions (otherwise students would not be able to progress to the next stages of their learning)
• Students are engaging in active learning that requires immediate feedback or clarification to keep them on track
• You are building community in a way that requires real-time interaction between students
• You are offering real-time support, such as through office hours and check-in meetings with student groups

Share Content

If you have decided that a synchronous session is the most effective approach for sharing particular content with your students, ask yourself:

• How will I build in appropriate contingencies to address the barriers caused by this approach (e.g., internet connectivity, technology issues, students’ responsibilities outside of my course)?
• What asynchronous alternative will I offer to students who are unable to attend?
• How will I incorporate active learning throughout the session to keep students engaged?
• How will I gauge student engagement and learning? How will I ensure that students are understanding the content, engaging with the content, and reflecting on their understanding?
• How will students signal if they have a question? (e.g., raise hand, type in chat)
• How long is the session? Can it be shortened?
• What technologies, tools, or resources will I use to effectively facilitate the event? What support do I need? What support will students need?

Many of the principles of effective video creation (see p. 15 of our Adapting your Teaching and Learning Activities guide) apply to synchronous lectures. In particular, create short lecture/presentation segments (no longer than 6-9 minutes in length), use signaling to highlight important information, segment and chunk information, and use complementary rather than redundant audio/verbal and visual elements.

Engage Students in their Learning

In your face-to-face class sessions, how did you ensure that students were engaging with and understanding the content? How can you adjust these strategies for the remote environment? The following suggestions can support student engagement and learning during synchronous sessions.

Before the synchronous session

• Encourage students to come prepared by providing an activity to complete before the session (e.g., writing prompts, a poll/survey, submit a question, find a relevant image/video, etc.)
• Communicate your plan for the session and your expectations for student participation

During the synchronous session

• Use tools embedded in your synchronous platform to support active engagement
  • Zoom has tools to encourage individual feedback and engagement (e.g., nonverbal feedback, polling, annotation, and chat) and for small group discussions and sharing (e.g.,  breakout rooms, sharing screens, and whiteboard)
  • Microsoft Teams has several tools, including live reactions, chat, breakout rooms,
• Use active learning strategies to encourage students to check their understanding, engage with their peers, ask questions, and brainstorm ideas (see page 16-28 of our Adapting your Teaching and Learning Activities guide for more information about these strategies and other suggestions)
  • Use breakout rooms combined with collaborative documents (e.g., Google Docs, Google Slides) for students to share and deepen their learning, and to easily monitor students’ progress during the activity
  • Use polling to gather responses quickly from all students (within your synchronous platform, or using another software, such as Poll Everywhere or Mentimeter)
  • Ask students to respond to key questions or writing prompts in the Chat
  • Use Think-Pair-Share or Think-Group-Share to spark discussion and sharing

After the synchronous session

• Use the same strategies from the Asynchronous Strategies section to encourage students to check their understanding, reflect on their learning, and apply or extend their understanding.

Build Community and Connection

• Use the active learning techniques suggested above to encourage connection, sharing, discussion, collaboration, and to help students get to know each other
• Pre-load a first slide to display as students are entering your session and waiting to get started. This slide can contain a question prompt to respond to in the chat, an icebreaker question, a poll, or an activity for students to do collaboratively (e.g., a paint-by-number colouring page, puzzle - see this Twitter thread for lots of ideas!), or an icebreaker question (see our webinar on cultivating community in remote courses, forward to 43:53 for information on icebreakers)
• Build a collaborative playlist with your students of music to play before the synchronous session begins, during breaks, and at the end of the class session

Additional Resources

• Engaging Students Synchronously and corresponding presentation slides
• Facilitating and Promoting Student Engagement in the Online, Synchronous Classroom
• Zoom Questioning Strategies to Increase Engagement
• Active Learning for Your Online Classroom: Five Strategies Using Zoom
• Community Building Activities

To support you with adapting your course to balance synchronous and asynchronous opportunities for students, we are offering the following programs and resources.