a·syn·chron·ous·

a·syn·chron·ous·

definition: “not existing or happening at the same time”

I recently surprised a professor friend with the “news” that I taught almost exclusively in an asynchronous format and have been doing so for the past dozen years. A colleague on staff at my school recently said about this format: “Don’t you just set up the class and they are left to learn on their own?” Another professor in my field when responding to my comment in a writing workshop that I do a lot of my writing in comments on Canvas posts said: “Isn’t that mostly cut-and-paste?” I have been surprised to realize that many people in my inner circle don’t think of asynchronous online teaching as real teaching work. I beg to differ.

Recently, I found myself in the worst of it. I was writing discussion prompts for week six while responding to late posts from students meant for week one while two-thirds of my students were talking with each other somewhere in week three. Others had turned in an assignment not due for two more weeks. All this teaching in multiple weeks in my course in one two-hour block while sitting at my kid’s desk on my laptop. He left for college a few weeks ago. We are all in different times, different places, but somehow still connected.

Asynchronous teaching is the stuff of sci-fi and fantasy. I engage in time travel on the daily. If only I was a Time Lord with a Tardis to travel in! Or Hermione Grainger with a magical Time Turner on a necklace so I could stop the other times to focus on the one in which I found myself. Instead, I just have a learning management system, where I click to the next item in Speed Grader and jump ahead or behind a couple of weeks to material that has since slipped from my leaky brain. I try to remember what the student would and wouldn’t have encountered at that point in the class as I respond to their work.

This morning, I found myself lying in bed and thinking about the clunkiness of the word asynchronous. What would be the word for being in a different place than your learners? A-syn-loc-ous? Oh, yeah. We just call that “distance learning.” Easy peasy. Everyone does that. But when we are in different times, we have a word that specifically marks the absence of togetherness: asynchronous. Out of time with one another.

In fact, this is not a new reality. John Dewey called it the greatest pedagogical fallacy, the assumption that students are learning what we are teaching when we are teaching it. I can remember sitting in the now-demolished stadium-seating lecture hall in seminary and watching some of the great professors of my era lecturing. Sitting near the back, I would amuse myself by watching my classmates reach the point when they gave up taking notes, hopelessly lost in the verbiage of our professors. A few at a time, their pens would go down in defeat, and they would sit back in the wooden theater chairs and stare blankly at the speaker, folding their arms defensively. Nowadays, they would pick up their phones or click over to another tab on their computers to check the news, less obvious means of abandoning the effort to follow along. Where the students were, in time, was some light years away from where the professor was teaching. They remained closer to the energetic start of the universe that the professor was now hurtling along the furthest edges of. 

Teaching involves many moments like these. Planning a syllabus and having to post it a month before the class starts, or having to propose it to a committee a year in advance. In either case, never having met the learners before devising a plan for their learning. Teaching students who have just been exposed to the material alongside those who have wrestled with it for a term or even for years. Teaching people ruminating on yesterday’s political assassination about something that happened a thousand years ago. Sometimes it feels like a miracle when we end up in the same time with the same focus.

All of this jumping to the location of students in time and space takes an enormous amount of imagination, energy, and nimbleness, whether online or working in person. But sure, why wouldn’t you put twenty-five or thirty-five students in my asynchronous class, since all I do is post the information and they learn it on their own in their own time? Turns out, asynchronous teaching makes me into an unwilling time lord without a sonic screwdriver in sight. But it also illuminates what Dewey named so long ago: meeting students where they are is no easy challenge, no matter the teaching modality. Teaching online and asynchronously just places this experience in vivid contrast so we recognize it more quickly and are forced to bear the weight of its reality.