Learning in Real Time

Synchronous Teaching and Learning Online

Jonathan E. Finkelstein

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780787979218
• eBook ISBN: 9780470596623
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Learning in Real Time is a concise and practical resource for education professionals teaching live and online or those wanting to humanize and improve interaction in their online courses by adding a synchronous learning component. The book offers keen insight into the world of synchronous learning tools, guides instructors in evaluating how and when to use them, and illustrates how educators can develop their own strategies and styles in implementing such tools to improve online learning.

CHAPTER 1

Learning, Live Online

With mounting experience in the online environment, an increasing number of learning professionals are now ready to find ways to add life, and the magic of real-time interaction, back into the learning process. In the vast movement to transition campus-based experiences to the online realm, the immediacy and value of live interaction have often been sacrificed to a perception that the Web is no place for anything that is not “anytime, anywhere.” Though “anytime” or asynchronous modes of communication have been an empowering factor in allowing learners to transcend traditional limits of place and time, not every learning objective or need can be met in the absence of real-time human interaction.

Situations that call for proximity to others, even figuratively, are found all across the learning continuum from collaboration to skills development to community-building or just-in-time support. Learning environments that have shied away from any form of real-time interaction may be unnecessarily limiting the overall potential of what each student can learn, and what the institution can offer.

Rapid improvements in technology and Internet connectivity, coupled with increasing comfort levels and support in using basic online communication and learning tools, have impelled educators to tap back into the fostering of relationships with students in real time that have been the hallmark of their on-campus teaching experience. Most important, a renewed focus on the quality of instruction and student engagement that has followed the first wave of online learning (Palloff and Pratt, 2005) inevitably means a greater consideration of tools that humanize the learning experience, efficiently teach and gauge performance-based skills, and cultivate natural means for collaborating and learning in real time.

SYNCHRONOUS INTERACTION ACROSS THE LEARNING CONTINUUM

Perceived by many as merely a means to deliver formal instruction or lectures online, real-time or synchronous venues actually play a much broader role across the entire learning continuum. In physical settings, live conversations and real-time human interaction are the lifeblood of academic life and adult learning. Remove from the equation things such as

• Unplanned chats among peers over lunch

• Lively in-class discussions or debates

• Student-led presentations or performances

• Study group, team, or committee gatherings

• Hallway conversations with classmates or colleagues

• Impromptu exchanges between a student and instructor after class or during office hours

• Timely and personalized guidance from a reference librarian, advisor, or coach

• Serendipitous meetings on campus

and what remains are course materials, reading assignments, and isolated, independent study—none of which provide the kind of supportive, dynamic, and human environment that helps learners be engaged, motivated, or successful. If the first wave of moving courses online has taught us anything, it is that opportunities for interaction and collaboration are crucial elements of successful learning environments. Not considering opportunities to add human interaction—in any form—to online programs or courses summarily dismisses a vital form of communication for learning, skill development, support, and community-building.

NEEDS SERVED BY SYNCHRONOUS INTERACTION

Although consideration of synchronous interaction might first turn to instructor-led activities or lessons, real-time interaction and learning can take as many forms and happen in about as many different kinds of contexts online as it does in our physical learning settings. At least five major functions are served by real-time, online interaction within a learning environment:

• Instruction

• Collaboration

• Support

• Socialization and informal exchange

• Extended outreach

Instruction encompasses any of the kinds of learning that happen when faculty members, knowledge experts, or facilitators meet with learners, usually in a planned manner in a specific online venue, to guide them through the achievement of learning objectives. This is a very broad category, and there are at least as many methods and pedagogical approaches to engage in live online instruction as there are in any other setting, online or off. Nonetheless, this book places a greater emphasis on an active or constructivist (Piaget, 1969) approach to instruction within synchronous settings. People need not be present concurrently with an instructor to simply have information passed on to them, yet the active construction of knowledge by learners through a process of real-time give-and-take is well-served in a live online setting.

Collaboration is a key element to the success of an online learning environment (Conrad and Donaldson, 2004). It is also, as I discuss later, a skill that has become part of a global working environment. Although the presence of a facilitator can guide collaborative activities, these interactions tend to be more egalitarian in nature and can happen at any time, in both structured and informal settings, with two or more people present. Live online settings offer an immediacy that not only allows collaboration to begin instantaneously but also contracts the actual time spent on task.

Support is a crucial element for retaining and motivating learners, whether it is provided by just-in-time assistance from a peer, instructor, tutor, advisor, or librarian. No other form of online communication can give personalized human support faster or at the moment it is most needed than a live exchange with the right person.

Socialization and informal exchanges are activities whose contributions to the learning process are most difficult to quantify. Interactions in this realm often dispense with formality and can even be short of substance, yet without them a crucial foundation on which to build instructional activities is lacking. The proliferation of instant messengers, online chat rooms, and mobile messaging in social contexts (Shiu and Lenhart, 2004) alone affirms that live online venues are an increasingly common and comfortable form of live interaction. In learning environments, they help build community and create a friendly and safe environment in which people can feel like people.

Extended outreach is an important aspect of any institution’s connection to the world beyond its gates. Admission information sessions, alumni relations, online conferences, multicampus professional development, and lifelong education programs are among the many reasons for the use of synchronous online communication outside of the formal instructional arena.

Various Purposes, Various Venues

There are almost as many online tools and venues for synchronous interaction as there are activities that call for their use. With instant messengers, chat rooms, online reference desks, interactive Webcasting platforms, and virtual classrooms, offices, and meeting rooms there is no shortage of available options to meet and interact live online. The ultimate question is what we do in these spaces that helps us achieve communication and learning objectives not realized as ideally in any other manner.

Why Live?

When it comes to instruction, course content and communication can be channeled through many forums and formats. The online environment offers a vast array of permutations for interacting and sharing knowledge with students. E-mail, discussion threads, Web resources, blogs, online reading materials, and recorded audio or video are just a few of the more common means to reach learners online. With so many tools and media formats available, the choice to “go live” online should be a deliberate one based on what can uniquely be accomplished when people congregate in real time. A successful real-time, online learning experience begins with a clear and confident answer to the question: Why live?

A prerequisite to the effective use of synchronous tools is that the decision to use these tools was made to support a cause worthy of the live medium. If the purpose can better be achieved through the dissemination of a document, via a link to a recorded lecture, or by a simple e-mail to students, it should. Synchronous learning should be deployed when synchronous learning is uniquely suited. Not adhering to this basic principle can damage learners’ trust in an instructor’s instructional prerogatives and dampen learner motivation.

THE SYNCHRONOUS COMPACT

Live online experiences must start with an implicit or even explicit compact or agreement between an instructor or facilitator and participating learners. In this “synchronous compact,” learners agree to minimize the distractions they have around them and to make every effort to contribute meaningfully to the experience. The instructor’s half of this bargain is to remember at every moment of every live session that there is a group of people assembled in real time who have set aside the same precious hour out of their day and to make every effort to use the time together in a manner that takes advantage of the fact that all are present in real time.

Meeting the Threshold to Go Live

In deciding whether or not to call for a live online session, it is extremely instructional to ask one’s self: “Why am I asking my group to all login at, say, 3:00 P.M. on a Wednesday? Why is it important that they all stop what they are doing to take the same exact hour to be online together with me or with each other? In light of all my available options, why is this the right way to go?” The lack of an answer that is compelling to you or that would be to your learners should be an immediate indicator to reconsider the alternatives. The full potential of any learning experience cannot be achieved when learners are led to ponder, Tell me again, why am I here?

New Opportunities

In addressing these questions and moving instructional experiences online, exciting new opportunities exist to rethink and improve upon old paradigms. One such tradition, for example, is the live lecture, which has been “baked” into the academic structure of most institutions for centuries. Taking a course—or aspects of a course—online need not be seen as requiring a direct translation of the thrice-weekly lecture to the online realm. The evolution of instructional design to include the use of synchronous online tools offers a great impetus to reinvent how instructors spend time with learners.

Using a real-time environment to lecture learners can be an expedient use of a virtual classroom environment, but it neglects some of the most creative possibilities of a tool that essentially “wires” all learners to the instructor and to each other. Such “connected” learning—the combined use of real-time polling, drawing, annotation, text chat, Web exploration, rich media, and visual, voice, and video tools with two or more people online—can open the door to new and unique ways to achieve learning objectives.

The synchronous realm of learning offers a variety of unique attributes, such as

• Immediate and just-in-time access to peers, instructors, and knowledge experts

• The ability for multiple people to interact and share ideas with one another concurrently

• Hands-on tools through which learners can react to presented concepts or apply knowledge in real time

• Direct connections to real-world situations and primary resources

• The means to demonstrate and assess real-time skills and analytical thinking

• The ability to include a more diverse learner population in real-time discussions

• The capacity to bridge guest expertise into the learning environment

The unique potential of synchronous instruction and real-time communication online must be recognized if the tools are going to be used effectively and truly make a difference in learner outcomes. Despite the growing use of synchronous tools in instruction, many years of experience suggest that the tools are still seen primarily as a means to replicate traditional, campus-based instructional activities—for good or bad—rather than to explore new avenues of improving student learning. An uninspired slide lecture delivered on campus will be at least as unappealing in the online environment, where the learner’s opportunities for distraction are greater.

Real-time, online instructional tools hold great promise. At their core is the potential to expose online learners, even at great distances, to the impassioned understanding and the contagious appreciation that instructors, and often peers, bring to the subject at hand.

The presence of a live instructor, combined with the use of the human voice and a rich set of facilitation and collaboration possibilities, opens up a new world for those who love to teach and who know that fostering moments of epiphany often requires the presence and real-time give-and-take of a guide present at one’s side. The use of synchronous tools among peers for both informal and formal instructional activities personalizes learning and provides a needed support framework. It is also closer in many ways to the mode of interaction through which many learners will need to apply their education in their professional lives, where demonstrating knowledge will often happen on the fly and via effective communication that will not always be asynchronous. I will discuss the role played by real-time environments in developing these kinds of learner skills in the next chapter.

INDICATORS FOR REAL-TIME ONLINE LEARNING

What are some of the indicators that a live online interaction may be the preferred means for communicating with learners online?

• Lessons are best learned from group discussion or collaboration. For an instructor, few things are as rewarding as watching the exploration of a topic take flight as learners discuss, collaborate, construct knowledge, and work together to solve problems. Many live online environments are well suited for this kind of learning experience and often offer greater efficiency than asynchronous alternatives. There are times when a real-time dialogue that unfolds over a five-minute period might take five days in an asynchronous format. Shades of meaning that are misinterpreted in asynchronous interactions and send groups on unnecessary tangents are resolved quickly in real time, and more relevant ground is covered.

• Sparking deeper appreciation for and understanding of the subject matter is desired. A good instructor not only teaches but also inspires. In offline settings, that inspiration is often conveyed through the conviction of the human voice, spirited explanations, and impassioned gestures. Spontaneity, humor, and direct invitations to engage learners in the here and now of discussion are all ingredients for the kind of contagious enthusiasm that arouses a learner’s deeper understanding and appreciation for the subject matter at hand. Real-time learning tools help expedite the generation of these sparks.

• A safe environment for exploration and sharing and a sense of community are vital to achieving learning objectives. The proper exploration of some topics relies on candid dialogue and sharing among learners. Ethics, counseling, politics, and nursing are but a few disciplines in which learners are often asked to share their personal opinions, biases, and feelings. A sense of community—where members of a group trust each other and their facilitator and feel willing and comfortable enough to contribute—can help expedite sharing activities. Live online settings can be safe places to quickly and efficiently build that sense of community and cooperation.

• Learning involves the rehearsal, demonstration, and assessment of particular skills. Whether it be oral communication, analyt...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• About the Author
• CHAPTER 1 - Learning, Live Online
• CHAPTER 2 - Real-Time Learning as Good Practice
• CHAPTER 3 - Tools for Learning in Real Time
• CHAPTER 4 - Real-Time Learning Venues
• CHAPTER 5 - Facilitating Learning in Real Time
• CHAPTER 6 - Real-Time Online Learning Activities
• Additional Resources
• References
• Index