 Hi, my name is Tracy Tejama Espinosa and this is a video on synchronous online learning tools. We'll remind ourselves of the definition of synchronous learning. We'll put this into context. We'll look at some examples and then I want to offer you a framework on how to choose your own tools based on this information. So synchronous learning, as we've mentioned a couple times before, the word cronus basically comes from the Greek god of time. So synchronous means that we're in time together. Now, don't get confused. This has nothing to do with online or offline. Synchronous just means when we are in the same time, not the same space. So it could be that we have synchronous lessons that are on 100% online, for example, or synchronous learning the way that you're used to being in the classroom setting. That's also considered synchronous learning. So I'm going to introduce this framework and we'll revisit this at the very end of the video, but let's think about it in this sense. We have synchronous learning options. This is real time, right? Face-to-face usually encounters. Face-to-face can be through Zoom, for example, or through other video conferencing methods, right? And that is contrasted with asynchronous, which usually means it's self-paced. These are things that students could do on their own outside of the classroom setting. They don't have to be online necessarily and they definitely are not necessarily with the teacher at that same moment. So we have this difference between synchronous and asynchronous, but we also want to look at tools that increase or that are beneficial for social interactions and those things that are really good for teaching content. We know that there's a lot of asynchronous repetition that you could do through something like Khan Academy, for example, which is heavy on content but has very little social interaction. So if we look at this, this is going to give us some examples of the types of things that happen. For example, great use of synchronous time is when you have small group discussions or you have collaborative work where if we're trying to get students to debate and cooperate with each other to problem-solve. Those types of things are wonderful for synchronous learning. We also know that asynchronous things that people need to do in their own time when they need to fill in their own gaps in knowledge can be benefited by things like apps or games-based learning or things like those Khan Academy videos where they can go over them one after another after another. So we see here that there's a very big distinction about how we're going to choose those different activities, the things where we need to be with other people, synchronous, the things that we can do in our own asynchronous. What's also really interesting to look at is that we can do a lot of differentiation when we are looking at synchronous social activities and asynchronous content-based activities. This is where we're differentiating homework. This is where we're taking advantage of the larger group being together. So keep those things in mind as we look at the ways that we can choose which types of activities, which types of methodologies, which types of app or digital technology might support our learning objectives. We also want to call your attention to this decision tree. The number one big idea here is that you can't really choose what kind of activities to do unless you have a really clear objective. But once you have a clear objective, you can begin to make choices. Is this going to be asynchronous or synchronous? For example, if you have an educational objective that you want students to learn to multiply and part of that means memorizing the multiplication tables, well, that could probably be done asynchronously. It doesn't necessarily have to be in front of you that they go over and multiply in their heads and try to memorize the multiplication tables. You might even use an online activity, one of these apps that facilitates that actually makes it fun through a gaming structure. So it's actually very implicit instruction. They don't even know that they're learning it because they're doing this gaming. So you're using this digital technology. That could be one objective. In another case, you might have the objective that you want students to learn to collaborate better and to work as teams and to appreciate teamwork. And so you might choose a synchronous moment when they're face to face in the same classroom. We could be inside the Zoom classroom, for example, and we're divided up into small breakout rooms. And implicitly, you're giving them a problem to resolve together, but what you're really doing is observing their behavior as they interact together. So depending on your objective, you can begin to use this decision tree to come to the best solutions of what choice of activities is most appropriate based on what your learning goals are. So I want to share a couple of tools that come from Top Hat. There's a great webpage that shares a lot of different resources. One of the things that they call out to teachers is that perhaps the biggest challenge we're all facing right now is that when we're online, we don't necessarily associate that with personalization and social-emotional challenges that exist. And we know that a lot of our students might be feeling alone in this process because they're in their own homes and they don't feel like they're able to socialize with others. But we can create that within our online learning structures. We can create these small cohorts of discussion groups, use breakout rooms. We can have collaborative activities. We can involve people in discussions. And we should really take advantage of the fact that there's many structures within video conferencing platforms right now that lend themselves to respond to the social-emotional challenge that we're all facing right now. A second idea would be to limit the tools that we use for communication. Don't invite students to use your personal telephone or email. Set up a structure that might be much more efficient in responding maybe in a quick five-minute face-to-face meeting. You could probably resolve a lot of things that might go on and on and on and on and on in a long drawn-out email exchange. So try to prioritize and think of what things could be best resolved through email and what things are best resolved through face-to-face. This means setting up a structure where you have synchronous online support either through something like office hours or a regular meeting time just before or just after your regular class time in which you invite students to have that live Q&A that might respond to a good majority of the group's questions. Other teachers who feel comfortable using things like Twitter or WhatsApp can set up individual hashtags or things that respond to a specific class so that you're able to quickly on the fly be able to tell what person in what classroom is having what kind of issue. Now be very careful with this because it can grow beyond its utility and become a burden to you. Take a very good conscientious choice about how you're going to have support whether or not it's going to be synchronous in terms of meeting times or whether or not you're going to try to use some of these other on-demand synchronous tools. A third idea is that in organizing these small group discussions either in breakout rooms or by giving students their own space to meet just before or just after class within your own online classroom you're facilitating that exchange between students. You can also do this through asynchronous activities like discussion boards but purposefully bringing people together to give that opportunity for exchange is really valued by the students and should be incorporated into your program. It's often surprising to teachers that when a small group of students are put together to resolve problems they actually come up with pretty amazing solutions and so giving them the ability in terms of dedicated time within the class where they are encouraged to work together is usually a very good decision. Now depending on the age of your students and the policies within your schools these things can happen synchronously or asynchronously through video calls. Some teachers feel comfortable using WhatsApp because it's an instant messaging and they know where their students are. However there's an issue of boundaries and sometimes you're getting messages at 10.30 at night that you really didn't anticipate and so use WhatsApp messaging sparingly. You might recommend to students that they themselves organize within WhatsApp groups but that you don't necessarily have to participate in those. The fourth recommendation that comes from Top Hat would be that we as teachers become a bit more creative in the tools that are available to us for evaluation so there's other types of evaluation mechanisms that can be leveraged within online that support an even broader diverse range of learners than we might have had in face-to-face contact whereas typically we're used to doing written reports or essays or optional or multiple-choice tests those types of things still exist online but if we're a little bit more creative we might even invite students to run an open webinar on a topic of their presentations or that they could create video content that they could upload or that they can do live performance or demonstrations of chemistry experiments or musical performances and document that. One of the most interesting dynamics that we're seeing now online is that we're able to document evaluation schemes in a way that we never have been able to before thanks to video and thanks to the analytics that are involved in our computers. The key idea of all of these is to create this community of inquiry in which all of the students feel that they're part of a larger community and that they can share back to the community and that it's not unidirectional and receiving information from a teacher in a talking head but rather there's this dynamic exchange and this is primarily enhanced through things like teacher presence, social presence and making sure there's cognitive presence. Not all of this should just be purely entertaining. This has to be something where there's really content and good education occurring. Three other ideas that come from Carleton University are to do things that we might not have typically thought about before for example process teaching, doing those flipped class videos in which you actually work through a problem with your student or leverage things like Khan Academy videos asynchronously where students can see steps in a process and then when you come together in class synchronously to actually apply that. Another idea is to bring in remote guest speakers. These days you can have somebody who is clear across the world be right in your own classroom when we leverage technology in this way. And finally they remind us to let the students help us teach. There's no better way to learn than to teach. So passing up some of those roles to students is really beneficial all around not just to us but also to them. One idea that you could use is just before any quiz you might have or any test you can ask the students well what kind of questions do you think I would ask you about the information we learned last week. Write up three questions that you think would be on a test that I might give and if I use your question you get a bonus point. So the person who does the work is the person who does the learning. So really try to use that student input to not only speed up your own processes but enhance their learning outcomes. Another idea from Angela State University is to think about using synchronous chats within your video conferencing structure. A lot of people find this initially kind of distracting because it seems like a parallel universe where you're encouraging people to pass notes behind the teacher's back because people are chatting while there's something else going on in the discussion of the live class. This is partially true but there are some huge benefits to doing this. Your brain needs both attention and memory to learn and if your attention is distracted because you have a question about something that just passed you really need to get that resolved before you're able to focus on the new information. So using that chat function is actually very beneficial. So you can have some real-time question and answers going on if you have an assistant in the class. If you don't have an assistant, ask students to be sure to chime in and answer each other's questions. We also use the chat function as an initial question in the first five minutes of class to say, okay, tell me one main point about the video that you really liked. Type that in the chat. That also helps me do a quick roll take right there to know who was in class on time. But you can also use it to do troubleshooting or instead of polling, you can do these things within the chat function as well. Or you can get students to offer short summaries, for example, of the small group work. We come back into the large group. We can call on a handful of people but we don't have enough time to call on everybody to see what happened in their small group. So we can ask them to summarize their ideas in the chat. Do use that synchronous chat function. It's an incredibly powerful tool and it also enhances writing abilities of students. So let's return back to this format that we suggested before. Think about some of these tools. Many of you are very, very familiar about using reflection papers or having students watch webinars or videos before they come to class. One of the big things to think about now is to now very conscientiously make a selection of a balanced choice of synchronous and asynchronous learning in which you're able to leverage that synchronous face-to-face time for the best possible outcomes. For example, mainly in discussions or in collaborative work or getting students to share ideas with one another. That is invaluable in synchronous work. It would be a shame, a crime to use the few synchronous moments, those hours that we have with those students online face-to-face just lecturing at them. We could do that in a flipped class video, for example. Why don't we take that and make that asynchronous, offload some of those dates, facts, formulas, things that we might just be sharing with them, offload those skill sets so that when we have our face-to-face time we can really leverage that for the things that are only done well when we're in a group together. So consciously think about your objectives and then decide how you're going to choose your tools. As a last recommendation, we'd like to invite you to watch the 50-minute video on 12 Steps to a Great Online Course that we have uploaded about the way we designed our course at Harvard University so that you can see the integration and the balance of asynchronous and synchronous tools that lead to really powerful student learning outcomes. And then pick and choose and decide which of those kinds of things would be beneficial within your classroom structure. Okay, so I invite you to reflect on that a little bit. Think about things that you might have learned, some things that you're curious about, some things you might change, and then you'll have a discussion. Looking forward to seeing you. If you have any questions before we have our live class, don't hesitate to write. Thanks.