Techniques and Tips for Planning and Facilitating Synchronous Learning Sessions

For designing your session, this is the typical process:

1. Know your purpose and align with learning outcomes
2. Use a lesson plan
3. Build community
4. Emphasize participatory, active learning
5. Plan for assessment in advance

As you design and plan your synchronous learning sessions, the following are tips and techniques to think about.

For building social and teaching presence:

Establish Tech and Time Communication Agreements

• What are the times that sessions will be scheduled? Are you firm or will you be attempting to accommodating students in other time zones?
• Are the live sessions mandatory for students to attend or are they optional? What you plan to do during the sessions is linked to this. If you are planning activities to occur during the session where student participating is vital to their learning, then making the sessions mandatory signals to students to their importance. Linking marks to their participation further signals the importance of their attendance.
• Will you be recording the sessions or not? If you are using the live session to make a presentation and making some time available for optional questions and discussion, there is less pressing reasons for students to attend the live session and they can get a similar experience from the recording you make. This might be suitable for students in other time zones who cannot attend. You could tie an activity to both options, attending the live session or viewing the recording, in order to drive participation and access of either option.
• How will features of the technology be used during the session? Set clear expectations about how you expect to use the various features, such as the chat and the use of ‘raise a hand’ during the session.

Create a Welcome Poster at Session Start

As soon as participants join an online meeting, they are reassured they are in the right place and seeing the right thing, with a slide or poster that lets them know they are in the right place. You could add the times of the meeting, the agenda, and your contact number should there be any connection issues, for example.

Be Visible

Use the advantages of a the web-conferencing tool for visibility. Use your webcam so that students see your nonverbal cues in addition to your voice. Doing so helps increase your presence.

Make the Purpose of the Session Explicit to Students

Ensure that you have communicated clearly to students the relevancy of the session. If students appreciate its relevancy, they won’t attend, and might rely on the recording of the session instead.

And to make things easier for yourself and your students, create an agenda based on your lesson plan for each session and make sure students get it in advance. An agenda does not just provide the basis for your lesson in the synchronous environment, it also provides your students a map to their participation during the synchronous session, so that they will be forewarned in advance when they will be expected to speak up and therefore ensure that they are ready both to intellectually as well as technically.

Ensure that they have the agenda in advance of the session as well as provide it at the beginning, perhaps on the Welcome poster. On the agenda, outline the topics for discussion and the type of activity each will be.

Use Ice-Breakers

Just like in the face-to-face classroom, a short and simple Ice-breaker activity can go a long way to settle the webinar jitters among your students.

Icebreakers in a synchronous learning session also help students get to know who else is present in the session. Some students might have their video enabled and some might not. A quick activity at the beginning helps students calibrate how and what they communicate as they participate, as well as help build trust amongst the group.

Some easy and quick icebreakers:

• Have each person introduce themselves via audio/video
• In the text/chat function, have everyone answer a question prompt
• Use the polling function to give their response to a question prompt
• Using a whiteboard function/screen-writing tools, create an image like a table, and have students write their names for where they are sitting at the table

Pacing

Expect to slow down, and plan for a slower pace in your agenda. Plan for up to 10 minutes for everyone to get connected and to test their audio/video and to settle in.

Further tips to ease anxiety and increase participation:

• Giving people a chance to say something at the beginning makes it easier for them to participate later
• If you are making a presentation, break it up into small chunks, and then break for check-ins with the group. You can ask them a question based on what you have just previously discussed and have them make their responses in the chat tool, clicking on an icon, or speaking directly with the mic. Choose one and communicate that one communication channel when you ask the question.
• Make space for quiet people to be heard as you would do in a classroom. Give quiet people a hint that you’ll be calling upon them soon, pulling them into the conversation.
• Be very deliberate and explicit when you give directions. For example if you are making a presentation, when you intend to pause in order to ask your students a question and have them respond via the chat tool, say, “I am pausing my presentation now.” Tell them explicitly what you want them to do: “Share your responses in the chat tool”. And when you have given them enough time to complete the task, tell them, “Let’s see what you responded” before you discuss their responses to signal that you are shifting the activity again. If you want your students to think about a question, be explicit about the ensuing silence that will come: “Let’s take a few moments to think about this. I’ll wait until you are ready.” Check in with the group after the allotted time has passed: “What do you think? Any ideas or comments, or would you like more time?”

Tips and techniques to increase personal connection

• Have everyone show themselves with their camera on, including yourself, at the beginning of the session. Doing so gives everyone a chance to project their selves into the virtual space and helps make connections between participants. You eventually might decide to turn all of the cameras off, including yours, if bandwidth issues are affecting the connection speed. Further, privacy and safety issues can also be concerns for our students so it is not recommended to have a mandatory on-camera policy for your course.
• If some people are on camera, then everyone should be on camera. If some participants don’t or won’t have video, then at least show a photo of other image of every speaker, if possible. Video images of participants seem help us feel more present to others and animate then those who are not. Make sure those who can’t also have a chance to get themselves “out” there in the session.
• Do everything so that you appear to be making eye contact. Look at the camera while you are talking and not at the other participants’ faces on your screen. This may feel strange at first because our instincts are to attempt to make eye contact with the people we are talking with. But if you look directly into your web cam, from your participants’ point of view, you will be looking directly at them while you are speaking. If you are looking at your screen, from their point of view, you are not looking at them but down at your hands or with your head turned away if you have multiple screens.

Ensure that any preparatory materials students might need have been available to them well in advance of the meeting

• In order to avoid delays during the synchronous session and to maximize students’ learning experience, ensure that they have access to any preparatory materials in advance.
• Pay attention to the various versions of particular documents in the preparatory materials. If you are sharing a version of a document during the live session of the course, ensure that it is the same version that you asked students to access for the preparation. Having multiple versions causes a lot of frustration for students, as they are looking for the definitive version that you will be using and that is considered most correct.

Have a lower-tech back-up

What will you do if the web conferencing tool is not working? It happens. Is the activity critical? How can you shift participation in the activity over into the asynchronous discussion forum if technical failure should occur?

Dedicate time to tour the synchronous environment

There are many different web-conferencing tools. It is worth spending the first 15 minutes of you’re your first synchronous session with your students providing them a quick tour of the various features within the tool that you’re using. In particular, familiarize them with the tools that you will be asking them to use such as putting up their hand, polling, and screen-writing tools as these are most often found in web-conferencing tools meant for education environments and less used in tools used for general communication.

Multi-tasking participants

It is a considerable challenge for all of us to be on the computer and ignore the notifications from our email and social media and our students are no different. Further, students may be focused on other tasks while logged into your session. Ensure that your online synchronous session has engaging and interactive activities to compel participation. Check in with participants frequently: if you are presenting, pause every five to seven minutes and ask students a question related to your topic and getting their response via the text/chat, or use the polling feature.

Planning the Time

For every hour of synchronous time scheduled, ensure that you leave about a quarter of that time unplanned. This unplanned time can then accommodate any technical or other issues that may have arisen during your session, as well as provide ample time and space for students to raise questions and issues that they might have.

If you are directly presenting a topic, try to speak for no longer than five minutes before pausing. In your pause time, direct students to an active activity such as responding to a poll or responding to a question in the chat/text tool. Chunking up your presentation into small units helps students stay on track as well as help you assess whether or not they are on track. Doing so also provides you with reminders of their presence. It is an odd feeling to realize that if someone saw you and didn’t know what you were doing, it would look like you are talking to your computer. Checking in with your students frequently is a way for them and for you to mitigate this odd feeling.

Getting Students to Interact with each other

Use collaborative brainstorming/crowd-sourcing activities:

• Within the web conferencing tool and using the whiteboard and drawing tools, have students contribute ideas to a common digital space
• Or use tools outside of the web conferencing system, such as google docs,
• Or get students to prepare their contributions on their own computers and then get them to share their screens during a discussion.

Instead of having students present to the entire group, one by one, send them to break out rooms to present to smaller groups, and then have groups report a summary of the presentations and ensuing conversations.