Synchronous or asynchronous
After you have chosen which type of courses to develop, instructor-led or self-paced, the design phase of your program development will include choosing the combination of tools and techniques that you plan to use for your courses. The second decision tree outlines a series of questions to consider if you have chosen instructor-led courses.
Web conferences are presently the first thing that comes to mind, since this technology has become so well developed and promoted by the many companies offering this service. However, I suggest continuing your analysis of the audience to assist you in investigating additional alternatives. Figure 2 contains the decision tree to use in this analysis. The answer to the first question, “Should I use synchronous or asynchronous communications?” will start you on the path of narrowing your technology choices.
The question at the first decision point is “Will the audience have control over their schedules and be available at the same time?”
For the scientists in my audience, the answer to this question was a resounding “yes.” Most of them worked in laboratories or offices in North America where they could conveniently schedule Web meetings during their business day.
We had some international participants in Europe, Australia, and Singapore who had to stay up very late or get up very early to join the Web conferences. However, quite a few willingly did this as the elimination of the cost and inconvenience of travel outweighed any inconvenience of joining a late evening or early morning Web conference a few times for several weeks. Those who could not avoid missing a live conference were able to view recordings later; however, to make the Web conferences work from the standpoint of interaction and instruction, the majority of participants needed to be present.
If the answer to the question of availability is “no” for the majority of your audience, then you are not likely to have well-attended Web conferences. If most of your audience would end up reviewing the recordings of the Web conferences rather than attending the live programs, then there is really no point in spending the effort and money on producing such conferences. It would be much less expensive to simply produce a recorded lecture or a written presentation of the subject matter. The use of asynchronous communications would be a better choice in this case.
An instructor can use many methods of asynchronous communication, including discussion forums, e-mail listservs, blog postings with responses, wikis, and perhaps others I haven’t thought of.
For example, some of my colleagues wanted to conduct an online training program for high school teachers who were unable to attend the in-person workshops that this group offered each summer. They wanted to have the interaction that an instructor-led program offered, but they knew that they would not be able to find a time when most of the teachers could join a Web conference. They developed a series of written and recorded online presentations, accompanied by assignments that the teachers were to complete. They divided these into separate lessons that they presented over a period of several weeks. Using a discussion forum, the instructor explained the assignment each week and directed participants to submit and discuss their results in the discussion forum.
There are more products and services available for asynchronous interactions such as discussion forums, listservs, blogs and wikis than I could begin to list, even including a few from Google and Yahoo. If you think your audience would prefer hearing lecture-style presentations to reading material written by your instructors, there are now many tools that facilitate recording presentations to be posted online. A few of these products are Camtasia, Articulate Presenter, Captivate, and Breeze.
If you answered “yes” that your audience will be available at the same time for a synchronous event, then your next question should be “Does the audience have high bandwidth Internet connections?”
Many Internet-based tools require a relatively high bandwidth for satisfactory use. Some of the Web conference service vendors claim to have software that is friendly to slow Internet connections, like dial-up. I have only had unhappy experiences with learners who tried to use slow or unreliable Internet connections to join Web conferences. They may have difficulty connecting to the conference in the first place, or frustration when graphics are slow to download and out of sync with the audio presentation. Firewall and security technology can sometimes present an insurmountable problem; however, we experienced very few problems with firewalls even though most of the participants worked in security-conscious organizations.
I think a “no” answer at this decision point should direct you to using synchronous communications that do not require high bandwidth, such as chat or instant messaging. You might even combine chat, or an online whiteboard, with a phone conference, if you feel the need to have real-time voice communication. Sometimes you can use a discussion forum in place of chat, if all users agree to post, read, and reply on the forum at a scheduled time.
If your audience has access to reliable, high bandwidth Internet connections, then a Web conference with either voice over IP (VoIP) or phone conference synchronized with the Web conference would be a viable technology choice. VoIP has gotten to be much more reliable than it used to be; however, we found that some users objected to the voice distortion and delays that can occur with it. If you have a small group, and are using a great deal of audio communication among the group, a phone conference may work better. VoIP is usually much less expensive than phone conferences; however, I also discovered that our conference phone costs per person decreased dramatically as the number of person-hours in conferences increased.
Conclusion
I hope that you have found the anecdotes in this article, and my approach to the analysis of the needs and technology capabilities of your target audience, to be helpful. There are so many variables to consider when starting or making changes to an e-Learning program, that having several different screening tools may assist your decision-making process. In the final analysis, a screening tool will only help to point you in an initial direction. Experimentation and experience will let you see what works for your audience and your subject matter. I hope that you are as lucky as I was to work in a situation that allows you the flexibility to test and try in order to find the combination that works for your organization.
