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I've been thinking a lot about how the research on online teaching pre-pandemic pushed a lot of us toward asynchronous delivery, but actually the conditions of online learning in the pandemic are so fundamentally different that this may have been the wrong call.
To be clear, I'm speculating and spitballing here. All I know is the narrow window I am seeing through of my experiences as a teacher and the students I do get to engage with in my classes. This is me ruminating, not claiming authoritative expertise on this.
The central thing, though, is that for the most part, people taking online classes before the pandemic had *other scheduled things* they were building around, and the flexibility of asynchronous courses became important.
The pandemic has dismantled a lot of those structures, and now people are staring at their computer screens in an amorphous time blob of material and tasks to get through, and any structure is built of their own creation. Those are...not the same learning conditions, at all.
There are definite drawbacks to synchronous scheduling, and I do think we profs needed to be given guidance not to just teach as though we were in person, but on a camera. But in retrospect, I'm a bit frustrated at our inability to recognize the limitations of prev research...
to transfer over to a context and conditions that were not the ones in which that research was conducted.
/end rumination.
/end rumination.
