Synchronous Communication: Uses & Strategies

Tools like Discussion, Announcements, and the Calendar are all ways of communicating asynchronously with students, meaning not at the same time. Asynchronous communication helps distance education fulfill its potential in the area of expanding access, as the tyranny of time is often why students take online classes.

Zoom

However, synchronous communication tools can support powerful interactive learning experiences as long as you provide alternatives (such as recordings of the sessions) to students who cannot attend. Strategically placed conference meetings throughout the semester can foster inquiry, the social construction of knowledge, and collaboration as well as decrease isolation (especially in online courses). Screen sharing, either live or recorded, allows you to demo applications and online resources, such as software and online databases. Conferencing is especially useful for these instructional strategies:

Modeling and explaining: An expert demonstrates the desired performance including false starts, mistakes and dead ends so students can see a process in action. Modeling shows how a process unfolds, whereas explaining involves giving reasons why it happens that way.
Coaching: The instructor observes a student complete a task and provides guidance and help.
Articulation: Ask students to think about their actions and explain their decisions and strategies. Articulation has been described as an elaboration strategy in which students articulate personal knowledge by summarizing, paraphrasing, creating analogies, etc.
Collaboration and social negotiation: Encourage interaction to share different viewpoints and to collaborate on problem-solving and knowledge building through joint construction of knowledge, negotiation, using peers as learning resources, & sharing workloads.
Multiple perspectives: Expose students to multiple points of view to construct new knowledge and acquire flexible and meaningful knowledge structures. Invite guest speakers to your meetings!

You have a free Pro Zoom account with ConferZoom!

The recommended web conferencing tool for SRJC instructional use is ConferZoom, which provides SRJC instructors free access to Pro Zoom tools. Students don't need an account to join your live web sessions.

Get Set up with ConferZoom NOW

Tool Tip To get started, download the Distance Education workshop handout: ConferZoom & Canvas Conferences (PDF).

[NOTE: This is a great week to join our Zoom: Live Session if you have not tried it out yet!]

Synchronous Communication in Canvas

Navigation tab in Settings

Canvas also offers options for synchronous communication, including Chat and Conferences. The Chat tool is an always-on, text-only page within Canvas that anyone enrolled in a class can use. The option to add Chat to Course Navigation is available on the Settings page. Note that all comments posted to the Chat tool are recorded and they cannot be deleted by students, only the instructor. Be sure to let your students know if you'll be responding to their Chat comments, or if you are providing access to Chat solelfy for students to communicate.

NOTE: A more fully functional tool in Canvas for synchronous communication is Conferences. You need to know about this tool because students will have access to it if you use Student Groups. However, it is not recommended for instructional use at this time. It is integrated with a program called BigBluebutton, which has not been evaluated to see if it meets California standards for universal design. Also the default license is for recordings that cannot be downloaded and are retained for only two weeks, so an institution would need its own contract to make the tool usable by students interested in reviewing archives of recorded sessions.

Canvas Instructor Guide

What is Chat?

Canvas Video Guide

Chat Overview