5 Tips for Using Synchronous Events in Your Online Course

Learners are increasingly taking online courses not only to learn at their own pace, but also to meet and collaborate with other learners from all over the world. For eLearning instructional designers, one solution to increase collaborative learning in a course is to inject synchronous learning activities. Synchronous events are live events that come right after one event has ended (i.e. without any idle time in between), and can provide new and exciting opportunities for interaction and communication between learners and course facilitators. Instructional designers can use synchronous events to serve different purposes in a course, including creating new means for instant feedback (for both learners and instructors) or generating excitement for an upcoming course.

While synchronous events may seem daunting or challenging to coordinate, with good preparation, they are easy to facilitate and can have many benefits for both the instructors and the learners. After testing and running synchronous events of our own, we have compiled a list of some of our best practices that we hope you can use in your next course.

1. Determine the goal of your synchronous event

What benefit would the synchronous event have for you and your learners? Is it to increase communication and collaboration in a course, or to have an opportunity to provide learners with feedback? Here are some synchronous events that we’ve used in our courses that learners have identified as helpful and worth attending.

• Course Preview: Generates excitement for your course by holding a live preview.
• Ask Me Anything (AMA): Offers the instructor or outside practitioner a chance to answer participant questions that may not have been covered in the lectures and/or videos.
• Virtual Coaching: Allows the coach to provide 1-1 private feedback to participants.
• Invite Guest lecturers: Invites guest experts to bring new perspectives to the course.
• Office Hours: Provides participants the chance to ask questions outside of class time about a particular assignment before it is due or to ask for feedback on assignments that have already been submitted.
• Course Wrap-up: Concludes the course and allows instructors to share final thoughts/reflections with their participants, as well as to reiterate any key takeaways from the course.

2. Find a good time to host the synchronous event

There are various benefits to hosting your synchronous event before, during, or after a course, depending on the purpose of your live event.

• Before: Generate excitement and increase registration for the course.
• During: Increase engagement in the course by creating new means for participants to interact with the instructors and with each other.
• After: Conclude the course by validating learner participation and providing concluding remarks and feedback (and perhaps share your upcoming courses).

While the duration of a synchronous event can depend on the topic as well as the learning outcome you are trying to achieve, we generally advise an event that lasts 30min – 1hr.

3. Get commitment from your learners

After deciding on the purpose and timing of your event, remember to get a level of commitment from people who are participating to ensure high participation and engagement during the event.

• Use a form or survey to determine which learners will be attending a live event. Send them a calendar invite so they don’t forget.
• If you are featuring assignments or answering questions during a live event, have learners submit their assignments or questions beforehand so the teaching team can decide on which assignments to provide feedback on or questions to answer during the live event.

4. Find the right tool for you.

Choose the right tool that’s appropriate for the purpose of your event. Before the live event, we recommend that both the instructors and the participants chosen for the live event do a dry run to make sure they know how to use the technology. We recommend testing different tools before committing to one for your live event. Here are some free tools that we have used and recommend:

• Google Hangouts on Air : Broadcast live events that anybody in the public can view. There is a limit of 10 participants in an On Air Google Hangout at once. So, 9 learners can be invited to be live on air with the broadcaster (or 8 if you will have both an instructor and a moderator). The Google+ event page that the Hangout will appear on is a good place for learners not participating in the Hangout to post questions. This way, the moderator and instructor can use these questions to supplement the participant’s questions, as well as answer them after the live event has ended.
• blab.im: Host live conversations that can be broadcast live to the public. Users can sign in using their Twitter account and can join the conversation using a live Twitter feed on the page.
• appear.in: Create a room and invite up to 8 participants to join your live event. Participants only need the URL to the event – no signin required.

5. Share the event recording

Many of your learners may be from across different timezone and unable to attend the live event. By recording the event and sharing it afterward, learners in your course will be able to benefit from the content shared during the live event.

Are you interested to learn more about designing online courses? Contact sales@novoed.com to learn more about NovoEd’s instructional design services. 

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