Michele Brannon-Hamilton's Blog

Everyone benefits from the synchronicity of communication “between an instructor, learners, and content” (Toolkit) because togetherness allows for the quick exchange of ideas. Of course there are problems like the students in one class being in several different time zones. Many students take online courses for the anytime anywhere features they can’t find when attending an actual classroom. It’s easy to see why synchronicity alone cannot create the kind of interactive classroom many instructors conceptualize.

So enter asynchronous communication tools. Instructors use these anytime anywhere tools to join all involved without the constraints of time or location. Users communicate freely and conveniently.

But can this ease of use backfire? With synchronous tools, communication is defined with a start time and an end time. Not so with asynchronous tools. In theory then, there is no end. Discussions can be endless and like anything that is endless, it can be overwhelming. How many messages should a student post or answer? Participation guides may say to answer a few regularly but when is few not enough?

In ETEC 565A, there are 1895 messages (as I write this) compared to ETEC 532 which has 729 messages. Does this mean one class is better than the other? If so, which one?

Of course, quality outweighs quantity but if students don’t read all the messages, they might miss something important. So in the end they may be left to wonder how these non-constraining asynchronous communication tools have managed to tie them to the discussion board with such unrelenting constraint!