Sync vs asynch

[Burnie]

First of all - I AM SO HAPPY TO FIND YOU ALL. I saw larryc, Polly and Ruralguy and about cried with joy.

Has anyone else run into an issue with students (and dear parents) claiming asynchronous lectures = "I had to teach myself"?

I have 150 students next semester and training says record lectures and use Zoom for activities and discussions, but complaints in our department (not just me) were intense and I didn't see many views on lectures.

Should I save some hassles over break and outline class topics and plan live lecture/activities days or should I pre-record as planned?

[polly_mer]

Good to see you, Burnie!  Welcome!

When I was teaching flipped classes (spend the class time applying the concepts with help; spend out of class time watching videos, reading material, and using interactive programs with immediate feedback), students always claimed that they were teaching themselves and were angry.  What I found helpful was being able to show with pre-instruction and post-instruction assessments that people who did all the work learned the material while people who skimped on the out-of-class material did not.

When I transitioned to a more traditional lecture + lab structure, those same pre-instruction and post-instruction assessments showed that people who did all the assigned reading, homework, and other coursework learned the material while people who relied on just the in-class portion to somehow magically become knowledge tended to have to repeat the course.  People were still angry at failing and angry at me for assigning "too much busywork" while refusing to believe that I was assigning sufficient practice for most people based on knowledge of the DBER and the student body at the institution.

What is best for whatever you are teaching under the constraints that you have?  A live interactive lecture may be the best for a given few units.  Even when I was doing a flipped classroom, several units had live lectures so that students could ask questions as we went along in the examples.  Having a firm grasp of the examples before going to the next part of the lecture was absolutely essential and students just wouldn't do enough practice if we weren't live.  Thus, we were live so that I could control the pace of that session and gauge whether the class was ready to move on or had to do another example.

Some things are just fine with a recorded lecture that allows people to pause, rewind, and watch multiple times at their own pace.  Students who refuse to engage with the recordings are cheating themselves and can be told so.  I used to ask to see notes from the pre-class work and then asked the same students for notes from the live lectures.  Usually, the same students had non-existent-to-terrible notes from both because they weren't doing the activities necessary to learn; those students were going through the motions and hoping that would be enough.  That may have worked in some classes where students went in knowing much of the material (again, some very interesting results from mandatory pre-instruction/post-instruction assessment), but that never worked out in any of my STEM courses.

[Puget]

I taught flipped last semester-- this is a ~100 student class that previously had been lecture-mostly, so I had been thinking about doing this anyway and then the pandemic forced my hand. It was a ton of work, but ultimately I think it worked well and I'll keep it flipped in future years.

Caveat that I haven't seen the course evaluations yet, but I did not hear complaints from students about the asynchronous lectures. I did hear from a few students who did NOT like discussion sections and in class assignments and wanted to only watch my lectures-- I've heard this is quite common, in that some students who are very used to passive sitting and taking notes in class really don't like having to talk, do group work, and do assignments in class. Others love it. You can't make them all happy.

Looking at the analytics, the stronger students mostly watched the lectures on time. The struggling students (a minority) late, partially, or not at all, but in a normal semester I think a lot of these same students would skip class, or be physically present but not really engaged.

Some of the things I did to try to make them take the asynchronous part seriously and learn from it:

--Instead of one long lecture, I recorded multiple short segments (no more than 20 min.), with a multiple-choice "learning check" (5-10 questions) in between. This helps maintain attention and provides immediate feedback on learning.

--I had an intro video that explained the concept of a flipped class and tried to sell them on how it promoted better learning, while emphasizing the need to manage their own time.

--In discussion sections, I referred frequently to the online lectures in a way that assumed they had watched them (e.g., "As you learned in lecture this week. . .", "Think back to lecture this week. . . ").

--They had a short written response ("thought question") due by the start of their discussion question each week, which required them to have at least some familiarity with that week's lecture content to answer.

[ciao_yall]

My students this semester commented that they felt very engaged with the class. I structured it in such a way that they interacted with each other a lot, and I also tried to be very available to them.

I don't record Zoom lectures because... they are boring to do, and boring for the students to listen to.

The assignments I have them do before class have them interacting with each other based on the reading. They are due before class, with the expectation that we will discuss them in Zoom class.

Then, we have Zoom class. I try to make it as interactive as possible. We have small group discussions on cases that will be on the test, and the students work on their term projects in a structured way so they clearly understand the requirements and get feedback from me.

I don't record Zoom class for later because then none of them would show up and then, what's the point?

While I don't give points for showing up to Zoom class due to equity issues (access to Wifi, personal responsibilities, etc) they clearly see that there is a lot of value to coming to Zoom class and participating.

It works well for my subject area - Business - but might be hard for other subject areas.

[Morden]

I did asynchronous this year with short pre-recorded videos and a lot of focus on discussion board. During the term I heard a fair bit of positive feedback, but the end of semester evaluations include several "I had to teach myself" comments. I don't know what I'll do going forward. Maybe I'll do a hybrid (and please nobody).

[ciao_yall]

I did asynchronous this year with short pre-recorded videos and a lot of focus on discussion board. During the term I heard a fair bit of positive feedback, but the end of semester evaluations include several "I had to teach myself" comments. I don't know what I'll do going forward. Maybe I'll do a hybrid (and please nobody).

Synch makes a huge difference, in all being present in the same place, even if it's Zoom. Students crave connection.

[Hegemony]

I have taught a number of asynchronous classes, and I've never gotten the comment that "I had to teach myself." I suspect there is some other variable going on there? I wonder what part the students feel they are "teaching themselves," and how it would be different in a live classroom.  One thing I am careful to do is to have helpful discussion boards (still asynchronous) in which I participate fully and volubly. I know that faculty in my program (whose evaluations I see, being head of the program) who do not participate in the discussion boards, except to grade them afterwards, frustrate the students. The students complain that they suspect they may be getting things wrong, or that the discussion is going off the rails, but the prof doesn't contribute or redirect or help move the discussion forward. So they feel they are discussing among themselves and may be going totally in the wrong direction, but have no way of knowing.  I don't know if that's relevant to the feeling that students have to "teach themselves," but it's something to be ware of.

[polly_mer]

I have taught a number of asynchronous classes, and I've never gotten the comment that "I had to teach myself." I suspect there is some other variable going on there?

What percentage of your students wanted to take your courses versus your courses being prerequisites/requirements in which students were resentful in the first place?

What percentage of your course is cumulative including all prerequisites and what percentage is essentially independent for people who are literate enough?  I noticed a lot of difference between courses that were math light, courses that were after the weeding out for poor math skills, and courses that required actually knowing the algebra that was a prerequisite for the "math light" course.

I remember one "fun" semester in which the students asserted that I wasn't teaching how to solve the problems when I had put an absurd amount of emphasis on how to solve the problems.  Well, it turned out that I was focused on translating English paragraphs into sets of solvable equations linear and quadratic equations--the hard part of intro physics is that translation.  These juniors and seniors in college majoring in a STEM field couldn't do the ninth grade algebra to solve a linear equation or apply the quadratic formula once we got down to one equation with one unknown.

That lack of prerequisites situation is one I seldom hear from the humanities side of the house and is one that seems to be missed in many cases of discussing what the professor should do differently in the course.  In many cases, the organizational answer ought to be "the prerequisites are in place for a reason and professors must hold the line on performance".

[spork]

I have taught a number of asynchronous classes, and I've never gotten the comment that "I had to teach myself."

[. . . ]

I get this complaint in face-to-face undergraduate courses, from students who think "learning" means "sitting in classrooms without taking notes or saying anything and memorizing some facts the night before an exam." I never get this complaint from graduate students enrolled in the asynchronous online courses that I teach every semester. The undergrads who complain about my face-to-face courses are going to make the same complaint about online courses, regardless of whether they are synchronous or asynchronous. 

[Anon1787]

Asynchronous requires more discipline, which many students lack. One student who waited until 2 hours before the final exam to start watching the lecture videos for the last 3 weeks of the course sent a frantic email to my chair complaining that the videos were not available (explaining that they were too busy doing other work to watch them when they were actually assigned) and complained that the course was asynchronous. And yet if the course had been synchronous, the student would have been completely out of luck if they had missed those 3 weeks.

[Parasaurolophus]

So many of my students are working full-time (during scheduled class hours, of course!) or back in their home countries that the content just has to be delivered asynchronously.

That's fine with me, but it leaves me at a loose end for synchronous discussions. They're hugely beneficial for their learning, but so few students attend (and so few have done the work or are willing to participate in any capacity other than as a blank and silent screen) that it seriously compromises their value, and it drains and depresses me like nothing else. Last semester I tried requiring everyone to post a question for discussion in these sessions beforehand, but it was a failure. Students also hated it, for reasons which aren't at all clear to me (but which I think mostly have to do with having to have some work done ahead of time).

So I'm a little torn. The synchronous component reassures them, but is mostly just a waste of everyone's time and my energy. Next semester, I think I'll keep it for my formal reasoning classes (where it's an important complement) and ditch it for the reading-based classes. I'd rather just have an open office hour for the keeners to come discuss things with me.

[downer]

I've never taught synchronous, since online courses were always asynchronous before the plague.

They are demanding for the students, but my impression is students learn more because they are forced to think for themselves more.

It's also worth highlighting that there are many different ways to teach asynchronous.

I would say that as a student, I rarely craved connection. And being in a lecture hall with a few hundred didn't give me much connection. I was happier at home with the textbook working it out for myself.

[jerseyjay]

I had been teaching asynchronous courses online for more than a decade before COVID, and had never taught synchronous courses online until this year. I think that lumping them together as "online" teaching doesn't make sense except in the technical (i.e., they require an internet connection).

As has been said, asynchronous courses require more discipline. I also think that many students who were not comfortable with the format just did not take them. Now, there is so much confusion over what type of courses is what, I think that there has been an influx of students who might not have taken such courses otherwise.

I find (both as a student and a professor) that asynchronous LOOK self-taught from the student's perspective because the student has to do much of the work without the voice of the professor being so obvious. The work in selecting topics, readings, materials, questions, problems, if done correctly, appears seamless. It is not that the student is doing the teaching himself, but that he (or she) must take an active role in the course and cannot just "coast". Of course, in most courses that involve a regular lecture, it is not a good idea to just listen to the professor and not do any work. But there is an illusion that this is possible, but it is not at all possible in an asynchronous course.  I always warn my asynchronous students that such classes are march more difficult than in-person classes.

[ciao_yall]

So many of my students are working full-time (during scheduled class hours, of course!) or back in their home countries that the content just has to be delivered asynchronously.

That's fine with me, but it leaves me at a loose end for synchronous discussions. They're hugely beneficial for their learning, but so few students attend (and so few have done the work or are willing to participate in any capacity other than as a blank and silent screen) that it seriously compromises their value, and it drains and depresses me like nothing else. Last semester I tried requiring everyone to post a question for discussion in these sessions beforehand, but it was a failure. Students also hated it, for reasons which aren't at all clear to me (but which I think mostly have to do with having to have some work done ahead of time).

So I'm a little torn. The synchronous component reassures them, but is mostly just a waste of everyone's time and my energy. Next semester, I think I'll keep it for my formal reasoning classes (where it's an important complement) and ditch it for the reading-based classes. I'd rather just have an open office hour for the keeners to come discuss things with me.

Mine hated it too, and having to respond to 3 classmates? They were super crabby about it. But when I explained to them I needed to have them interact with each other, they sort of got it. And I had to have them show they had read the material, would they prefer a quiz? NOOOOOOO!

By the end of the class it turned out they really enjoyed posting back and forth and getting to know one another.

[Caracal]

It depends how you run class and what the costs of the different methods would be. My feeling throughout this has been that I don't want to be essentially designing completely new versions of my courses that I won't want to do teach after this is over.

I understand that if you're teaching labs, you don't have much of a choice, and, of course, if you have the time and have been considering changes anyway, it might make sense to redesign. I completely redid a class for the last summer session to make it asynchronous. Some things worked well, other parts didn't work at all, but it was a course I wanted to rework anyway, so it wasn't lost labor even if I never teach it online asynchronously again.

However, most of my classes I teach as combinations of lecture and discussion. That's how I do my best teaching, but it isn't a format that translates well at all to an asynchronous course. It isn't ideal for online at all, but if I try to create brand new courses, I'm not actually going to create a better class for the students this year. Maybe it would be better next year, but by then there'd be no need for it.