Preparing for Synchronous Sessions

Designing your session

Designing learning is a big topic overall, but here are some key points that you'll want to consider as you think about designing your synchronous sessions.

Alignment with your Learning Outcomes

We said earlier that it is important for you to think about your purpose of why you think it's best to hold this particular session synchronously online and to get clear on the learning outcomes that you'd like your participants to be able to achieve by the end of the session. Once you are clear on these items, it's time to think about the content and activities that you'd like to incorporate into your session and how can help support your participants to achieve those outcomes.

Using a Lesson Plan

Similar to designing to facilitating sessions in person, it may be useful to create a lesson plan to design your synchronous online session and use it when facilitating the session. You may have a lesson planning structure that you are already familiar with using but if not, something like the BOPPPS framework could be useful.

At the very least it would be ideal to create a plan - perhaps like the table below - that notes timings of all your content and activity sections, duration of those sections, facilitator activities, participant activities and any resources needed. You may wish to script some of what you'd actually say or paraphrase during the session.

Here is the beginnings of such a plan:

screenshot of a table with time, duration, facilitator and participant activities and resources needed

And here's a similar yet slightly different Sample Session Planner Tool from Cindy Huggett which you may also find useful.

Building Community

Depending on who your participants are and how well everyone knows each other already, you may want to think about starting with activities that can help start to make everyone feel comfortable in the synchronous online space if you have time. Even something very quick in a short session could be beneficial to the overall goals of your session.

Some questions to think about as you design your opening activities to build community together include:

How can the facilitators introduce themselves? If so, what should be shared in that introduction and how much time should it take?
Should the participants introduce themselves? If so, what should be shared in those introductions and again, how much time should it take?
How much time should the facilitators spend talking before participants are asked to do something active, such as introduce themselves? (Hint: not very long!)
What will be comfortable for people to share if they don't know each other? What will be comfortable if they do?

Participatory, Active Learning

Overall in this course we are discussing and promoting synchronous online sessions that feature participatory, active learning. Thinking about how to design a session that actively includes your participants in contributing to their own learning is our ideal. Some of the questions we can ask ourselves to be able to design these types of sessions are:

How can I "share the air" with the participants in the session? How can I make sure that the facilitators are not the only ones talking?
How I can create situations where participants are able to share from their own experiences, to contribute to group learning?
How can I ensure that the session includes time and space to allow for questions and discussion?
Are there ways in which I can use the platform's tools (see above) to contribute to an active learning situation, that are appropriate to my intended outcomes for the participants?
How can I balance content sharing from facilitators with discussion or other participant activities? How can I "chunk" sections of the plan into short pieces, to keep the agenda moving and participants involved?
How can I engage my participants visually and auditorily during the session?

Nancy White, in her blog post entitled, What are your most useful synchronous online facilitation practices?, said "It is the masterful use of a shared white board to move people from being consumers of a meeting to being active participants." (A whiteboard is just one example of a tool that could support active learning.) Overall, thinking about how your participants could be not just passive "consumers" of information that you dump into their heads, but actively involved in the process is a useful lens to keep in mind. And you know what? Facilitating sessions that are active and participatory often end up being less work for the facilitator than if you were just to present content the whole time! (And a lot more engaging.)

Assessing Participants

Depending on the nature and purpose of the session you are designing, you may need to evaluate your participants at the end of your session (or after it) to see if they can truly achieve your intended learning outcomes. While assessment and evaluation is also another topic for another whole course (!) we'll just say this: your stated learning outcomes, content, activities and assessments all should be aligned. What does this mean? Here's an example:

If we think about our swimming example mentioned earlier, which of the following situations would be fully aligned, with learning outcomes, content/activities and the way you assess your participants all directly relating to each other? Which would be misaligned?

Situation #1

Learning outcome: "Participants will be able to describe three strategies which would help them swim 50 metres in a competition pool."
Content/activity: During the synchronous online session you and your participants discussed three strategies which would help them swim 50 metres in a competition pool.
Assessment: After the session you took them to a competition pool and graded them on whether they could swim 50 metres.

Situation #2

Learning outcome: "Participants will be able to describe three strategies which would help them swim 50 metres in a competition pool."
Content/activity: During the synchronous online session you and your participants discussed three strategies which would help them swim 50 metres in a competition pool.
Assessment: After the session you asked them to write a minute paper describing three strategies which would help them swim 50 metres in a competition pool.