Synchronous Communication

Until now, I have considered online courses to be a low quality substitute for face to face classes – “real” school. Remember “mail order degrees”? Even our school is sugar-coating the concept. As we are assigned online course developments, we are reminded that some students aren’t able to attend face to face classes (the implication being that f2f is a superior delivery model), so we will offer this to a different market.

My online course development is primarily asynchronous, offering a variety of content uploaded to the site, a series of assignments submitted to drop boxes, discussion groups around the assignment submissions, online quizzes, and remote proctored final tests. I felt comfortable with this format based on my experience as a student in online courses. As a student, I concede I would not take the course if it wasn’t available on my own time in an online format. And, the asynchronous platform suited me well as a learner.

This week turned all that around for me! Participating in a short Collaborate session in which I could chit chat with other students before the class began (typing in chat function, or with audio/visual), and then finding myself fully engaged with the range of audio and visual functions presented was an amazing experience. I saw that connection and a sense of fun and belonging could exist in the online environment, and that it is greatly enhanced with the addition of a synchronous option. I am very excited at the possibilities for students who are struggling alone with an assignment and just need a little direct help over a small barrier – suddenly this is possible in an online course in a way that I hadn’t imagined.

Most of my classmates are in the US and seem familiar with these tools. I have taken some training previously but haven’t had motivation to use them. Now I am excited to offer them even in my face to face class. This way, I’ll be more practiced when the time comes to deliver an online course.

Later in the week, I used Skype along with a google doc. This allowed my partner and I to edit a document simultaneously, at the same time as we chatted in a sidebar, and could see and hear each other via Skype. It worked seamlessly, and once again, was fully engaging as there were a variety of things to be reading as we chatted and were able to see each other.

As a stark contrast, one day later I participated in an old-style conference call. I dialed in, entered my passcode, waited for other voices to join, and finally sat on the phone for 45 minutes with 6 participants. We referred to a hard copy document we had, but apart from that we had no visual content to the call. It was functional, but most certainly did not build rapport or a feeling of team the way the other tools had.

 

It's exciting to be learning to use these tools.

Lynn