Many online schools are asynchronous so that students who are in different time zones, or who have busy schedules can all have class at different times in an online classroom. I have students who have weekend schedules and who only have time to do homework and classwork on the weekends when they are off from work, while other students want to take weekends off and only have time on weekdays to do their classwork. Some stay at home moms like to do their homework while their kids are off at school so they do their homework on weekday mornings to early afternoons while working parents do classwork on weekday nights. As an online teacher, you have to be able to handle the schedules of all these students. In order to accommodate all these students' schedules, you may have to hold synchronous meetings on week day during the day, weekday night and on a weekend. Being an online teacher is not easy!
The advantages of holding real time meetings with students is that students can ask the teacher questions in real time. You get to hear your students' voices and see their faces via webcam. For once, you can use body language to see if your students are understanding what you are teaching. I find that I can teach more effectively when I teach real time. I can also teach much faster basic concepts like the 5 paragraph essay structure in just 10 minutes or so rather than take a whole week when I teach just using online means. I also get the immediate satisfaction of seeing and hearing my students understand the concept and integrate the concept just like when I was teaching face to face. In fact, the hardest thing for me to get used to when I transitioned from face to face teaching to online teaching was the lack of body language in my student audience when I was teaching a concept.
There are many ways you can hold a real time meeting. You can use Skype to meet one on one with a student, or you can use Adobe Connect to meet many students at the same time. Adobe Connect provides a space for your webcam and the webcam of your students. Adobe Connect allows you to communicate with one student for remedial purposes or hold a class with many students at the same time. I have used Adobe Connect white board to teach many writing concepts and I find that when I meet my students in real time, it helps us bond as a class and helps us create a learning community of trust faster than when we do it online over a period of days, we can develop that bond over a period of an hour instead.
Real time meetings helps with 3 kinds of interactions crucial to any online class--1) Student to Student interaction. 2) Teacher to Students interaction and 3) Teacher to Student interaction. Students can peer review and talk with each other in real time about difficulties they are having with an assignment. Students in real time can give each other advice on how to do an assignment, or how to find resources in the classroom. If I have students from different classes in an Adobe Connect classroom, then students in a more advanced class can tell the students from the less advanced class what to expect later on in the class. Real time meetings help with Teacher to Students bonding as mentioned above. And lastly, Real time meetings helps Teacher to Student interaction when a particular student is getting a low grade and needs extra help from the teacher on why he made so many mistakes in his paper.
Real time meetings improves Teaching Presence where teachers get to teach on the white board and get to clarify whatever students did not understand from the online lectures and online forums. Real Time meetings helps students see the teacher as a real person which improves Social Presence and most importantly, Real Time meetings helps teachers recognize what weaknesses and difficulties students are having in a class which helps improve a teacher's Cognitive Presence.
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