How are you, teachers? Are your classes proceeding as you have planned?
By now, you know that less material can be covered in 1.5 hours of synchronous session than in 1.5 hours of face-to-face classes. So how do you decide which material to keep or cut out? How do you choose which material to bring to a synchronous session and which to let students navigate at their own pace?
“Do the laundry test,” said Dan Levy, current faculty director of Public Leadership Credential, Harvard Kennedy School’s online professional credential program. In an article for Harvard Business Publishing Education entitled The Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Balancing Act, Levy recounted what his student’s answer was when he asked her how she chooses whether to join the live session or to watch the recording (which is an option in other schools). The girl replied, “When I am trying to decide, I ask myself, ‘Is this a class I could attend while folding my laundry?’ If the answer is yes, I watch the recording. If the answer is no, I attend the live session.”
Though the same setup of giving the students the liberty to attend the synchronous session or not may not be applicable in your own school’s setup, Levy said that the spirit of the girl’s answer may help teachers determine which material to leave for asynchronous session. “If the students can conceivably fold their laundry while engaging in the experience, my advice is to either eliminate it or reserve it for asynchronous learning,” the author of the book Teaching Effectively with Zoom said.
Levy offered the following considerations when trying to strike a balancing act between synchronous and asynchronous sessions:
- Synchronous learning is better when it is important that your students exchange ideas and learn from each other. During these interactions, which are opportunities for community building, the teacher can act as facilitator or mediator.
- Asynchronous learning is better when it is important that your students reflect on and develop a foundation on the material before going live.
- Asynchronous learning can benefit the conduct of the synchronous session. Collect information about your students from their asynchronous session that you can use to plan your synchronous session better; this step can be done through a pre-class survey or quiz that forms part of the course grade. What have they mastered and what have they not? You may spend more of the synchronous session on those parts of the lesson that they have not mastered. Do they have misconceptions about the subject (which you can deduce from multiple-choice questions)? Then you can spend more of the synchronous session in clarifying these concepts.
Blended learning may be here to stay, and it may not always be easy, but teachers can always start small. See what works and what does not. “You will learn a lot,” said Levy.#
Banner photo by Chivalry Creative on Unsplash.
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