Online Asynchronous Teaching Resources

• The team at Stearns Center is available to help you with questions about the design and implementation of your course, with advice about strategies, choices, policies, and interactions that improve your students’ learning and your own efficiency and satisfaction — whether you’re teaching in a classroom, via synchronous web-conferencing, in the field, or asynchronously via Canvas.
  • Check our list of upcoming office hours, webinars, and workshops
  • Get in touch with an Instructional Designer by submitting questions or requesting a 1:1 consultation here
  • Check out our self-paced courses (see below)
• The team at Instructional Technology Services is available to help you with questions about how to use Canvas and related tools to support all of your courses.
  • Canvas Office Hours (faculty/staff live support) weekdays, 9 am-5 pm EST: Log in to MyMason, on the Home page under Welcome Faculty and Staff!, find the link to join the session.
  • Email [email protected] or contact the ITS Support Center

• Check our checklist! Stearns Center’s Online Course Readiness Checklist gives you an overview of best practices, and is a good place to start your course design
• Consider elements of basic course redesign:
  1. Successful redesigners are able to prioritize goals within course learning, since they may face time and resource limits
  2. Successful redesigners are able to identify basic preparational knowledge that students can learn without much intervention or interaction
  3. Successful redesigners are able to identify more complex or difficult knowledge that will benefit from interaction, stepwise learning, collaboration, and/or their instructional encouragement and feedback
• Create a communications plan with Announcements, which leaves a good trail, and which more students check than their email! Plan to send new announcements regularly.
  • Consider a beginning-of-the-week announcement: you might preview the coming week, share tips about an upcoming assignment, and/or identify any special preparation or required resources.
  • Consider a midweek or end-of-week announcement: you could summarize key insights for the week, emphasize connections between the week’s topics and current events, and/or highlight especially good student posts or projects.
• Set due dates for key learning efforts (but see “Build in Flexibility” below): reading and viewing, discussions, responses, assignments, quizzes. Remember that even asynchronous learning happens on a schedule: you are not preparing an old-style correspondence course or a set of independent study situations.
  1. Students benefit from having and keeping a regular schedule
  2. Learning in a social cohort strengthens student performance and increases retention
  3. Inform students of due dates and expectations: In addition to communicating about deadlines, you can help your students with reminders about how to use their study time or preparation time. Online tasks may take them longer than they expect, and the “freedom” of online learning may make it more difficult for them to plan adequate time on task.
  4. Consider the spacing of your deadlines: In order to have students both Post to a discussion and Respond to others’ posts, for instance, it helps to have two deadlines for that process.
• Build in flexibility: This is not a contradiction to “set due dates” but an addendum, especially for learning during a time of interruption and fast-changing environments.
  1. Acknowledge working students: 9:00-5:00 deadlines may not be appropriate for some classes or students, especially classes already scheduled in the evenings. Please use deadlines that make sense for your course.
  2. Allow some leeway without penalty: During an unsettled time, many situations can cause delays even for dedicated and responsible students. Technology glitches, wifi access, family needs or emergencies, or issues of their own health or safety can complicate their work as students. For instance, rather than monitor a plethora of explanations and excuses, consider offering all students one or two “Life Happens” passes as you get started: Students can be up to 24 or 48 hours late without penalty or long explanation needed as long as they contact you to request the extension.
  3. Help students adapt: Be open where possible to how individual students may need to make other arrangements in order to be successful in your class.
     1. Students without reliable high-speed wireless may need to find a location where they can download materials and then return to their home or workspace to complete assignments.
     2. Students with documented disabilities may need additional support; please contact the Disability Services office and/or Assistive Technologies for more information
     3. Students whose own children or other family members require attention may need additional deadline flexibility.
  4. See our advice sheet about designing flexible policies for more ideas about teaching flexibly during a pandemic.
• Consider alternative approaches to assignments and activities you know well
  • Start by considering the main outcomes for students and working backward: the goal of any activity or assignment is not for students to complete it, but for them to learn and practice particular concepts or skills. Often there are alternate pathways that students can travel to acquire and demonstrate mastery of crucial goals.
  • Sometimes taking out or altering a single step can allow students to achieve  the key learning necessary, even without access to a F2F classroom: students scheduled for a lab might not be able to gather new data or produce a working model, but they can still analyze one or more sets of real data, identify and evaluate design strategies, and/or review case studies or scenarios. For some examples, please check out University of Nebraska’s recommendations for adapting your lab session to online learning, or review James Madison University’s suggestions for labs and fieldwork adaptations
  • Sometimes reorganizing the order of events in a semester can allow you a chance to develop further resources.
• Adapt to new challenges in time management. Teaching and learning online require different strategies for managing time. For ideas to help you and your students, check our Managing Your Time tip sheet.

Build or Add Content

• Choose Kaltura for recording a presentation that can feature your voice, your face, and/or your slides or documents
  • What’s a microlecture? Download this guide to preparing a five-minute microlecture that emphasizes key concepts without overwhelming you or your students.
  • Consider videos for different purposes: See our Seven Videos to Engage Your Students handout for ideas.
  • Need captioning? All courses that have students with sensory impairments should already be in touch with Assistive Technologies, and those are priority cases; however, other faculty do also have access to free captioning services for Kaltura videos and other accessibility support provided by GMU’s Assistive Technology group; see their contact data on the information sheet.
  • Need video of your demonstrations? If your students need to see you do something on campus (dance, manipulate a specialized tool, perform an unusual experiment, manipulate a patient’s ankle), that doesn’t have to happen “live,” GMU TV can help: see a description of their resources here.
• Explore open educational resources: Use Mason Libraries’ own OER Metafinder to locate materials that you can use to support your students’ learning
• Consider other content sources: You don’t have to invent every wheel! Check these sources for high-quality instructional videos
  • Academic Video Online (wide-range of documentaries, informational videos and film)
  • edX Courses
  • A set of lab simulations from Harvard’s LabXchange
  • JOVE Science Education
  • LinkedIn Learning
  • MERLOT (Online Courses, Online Modules)
  • MLA Digital Pedagogy Commons (online course modules for Humanities)
  • National Science Digital Library
  • A wealth of online STEM simulations from PHET

Asynchronous online teaching refers to a fully online course designed in Canvas that includes all course materials, recorded lectures, and assignments. You can incorporate active learning strategies into this course in a way that keeps students engaged. The “Actively Engaging Students in Asynchronous Online Classes” handout provides tips on using web-based tools inside and outside of Canvas to provide opportunities for students to engage with one another.

Common Active and Interactive Strategies: Even if you are used to lecturing or facilitating small group discussions, you can utilize active learning strategies to make them more engaging.

• Microlectures (recorded via Kaltura) provide brief but effective explanations of a concept or skill and allow students to focus on key concepts. Download this guide to preparing a five-minute microlecture that emphasizes key concepts without overwhelming you or your students.
• For additional connection, you might try an interactive lecture approach, splitting your longer lecture into small pieces interspersed with quizzes or discussion activities, which keeps students engaged through activities that can also be collaborative. Take a look at the Interactive Lectures section of this guide on lecturing for tips you can use.
• Discussions can engage students in higher-order learning by providing an environment for peer-to-peer learning. Start by downloading our Guide to Facilitating Effective Online Discussions.

Feedback: Feedback is essential, but it can also be time consuming. Consider our overall tips for Managing Feedback to Students

1. Synchronous learning (real-time video streaming of your course) allows you to present materials “live” to engage with students one-on-one or in small groups.
   1. Use synchronous elements judiciously in an asynchronous course: for small optional groups or office hours. Synchronous whole-class activities are not recommended for a course that is designated online-asynchronous, since many students will have challenges meeting at specific times.
   2. For synchronous teaching, choose MS Teams or  Zoom.
2. Compare and plan: To help you plan your synchronous activity, take a look at this Synchronous Activity Planning document.
3. Need captioning? Zoom provides captioning. All courses that have students with sensory impairments should already be in touch with Assistive Technologies, and those are priority cases; however, other faculty do also have access to free captioning services and other accessibility support provided by GMU’s Assistive Technology group; see their contact data on the information sheet.