Synchronous (or Remote) and Asynchronous Teaching
The question sometimes arises, “Haven’t I been teaching online for the past year and a half by Zoom?” The answer is yes and no.
Teaching remotely using Zoom or Blackboard Collaborate is still live, in-person teaching. Instead of meeting in a physical classroom, faculty and students meet by webinar. The class sessions occur at the same time the class would have been scheduled to meet in the classroom. After adjusting to the nuances of teaching by webinar, faculty see that teaching remotely is similar enough to what they are used to doing when teaching on-campus.
On the other hand, asynchronous online courses usually have no live, in-person meetings or in-person instruction. The entire course is conducted asynchronously. It requires a significant redesign to adapt the course for asynchronous online delivery to intentionally plan content delivery, assessment, and student engagement in the absence of live, in-person instruction.
Asynchronous online courses use weekly deadlines to keep students on schedule, including a mid-week deadline to ensure students actively participate throughout the week. A course that relies heavily on interaction/discussions, such as a seminar, may use three deadlines per week to keep the interaction moving and introduce new discussion topics as the week progresses. Meeting the deadlines requires a significant commitment on the part of the students and the professor. An asynchronous course is no less rigorous. It meets the same objectives as the on-campus version of the course. Students and professor work on the course as they are able each day and throughout the week, while the weekly deadlines and the mid-week deadline(s) keep everyone actively engaged.
Synchronous remote delivery is still live teaching and generally does not require a complete redesign of the course. Once faculty adapt to teaching by webinar, they quickly realize that most of the small group activities and large group interactions they commonly use can be adapted to the webinar platform.