Asynchronous Online Instruction: Creative Collaboration for Virtual Student Support

Introduction

Working with students relegated to a satellite campus to complete their degree has heightened our awareness of the academic divide that exists for distance learners in terms of academic support. What an administration sees as an opportunity to expand offerings, students often see as exile from vital resources—the campus library, tutoring center, and of course, food areas. The institutional answer to this dilemma has been to increase online course offerings. For students, one of the attractive features of online learning is convenience. The overly popularized image of taking courses while in pajamas conveys a message of easy-going nonchalance in which students can essentially learn at their leisure. However, once students actually enroll in an online course and discover the rigor involved, this notion is rapidly deconstructed. The actual convenience of online can be called into question when considered from a variety of vantage points. Students in face-to-face courses have quicker access to the instructor, who is available in class to answer questions immediately. Equally, their peers are more accessible, explaining why collaborative activities seem to progress more smoothly in traditional courses than in their online counterparts. Such discrepancies may explain why, in online courses, students who typically go without these integral services subsequently struggle.

The idea of online learning and synchronous learning seems to be oxymoronic. While shying away from online classes as a "convenience" for students, we respect that flexible, less traditional platforms can be advantageous for academic success. Yet, it is not practical to assume success without academic support systems—we do not assume such in the face-to-face classroom. Online instructors commonly connect writing assignments to library and writing center resources. Should their absence diminish the quality or quantity of the student's educational experience? Online courses can, as Scott Warnock suggests, "provide a needed method of delivering courses to people whose lives have undergone significant disruption" (xix). This is our student population. Much of the research written on writing theory-to-practice tended to discuss more theory than practice. A burgeoning field of online writing research is expanding, but there is a dearth of information on practical application as it relates to academic support for writing instruction. While there are those writing about technology and its impact on tutoring centers, the voice linking these centers to online support is relatively silent. Similarly, librarians are providing virtual links to their resources; however, few are being summoned into the virtual classroom to maximize their expertise.

This discussion describes a project in which an online composition instructor incorporated asynchronous online options from the college library and tutoring center to increase the academic support available to her students and thus provide a more robust learning experience. Initially, mutual interests in virtual learning, along with an online pilot project in the tutoring center, helped to bridge this support gap. However, our endeavors were met with challenges beyond our control. What began as the work of one instructor soon became a collaborative project of three dedicated professionals with limited means. There were no additional physical or financial resources to link classroom content with brick and mortar resources. The lack of institutional support to provide equivalent support in the online environment only broadened the scholastic gap for all online learners within the college. As a result, these challenges precipitated creative collaboration that began as nothing more than an enthusiastic endeavor of three people who were committed to student success in online writing courses. As we grappled with methods for providing this support, the dilemma of synchronous methods that attempt to recreate the face-to-face classroom, versus asynchronous methods that meet the needs of our student population, became the focus of our work. Ultimately, our research concluded that asynchronous methods continue to be a viable option if they are empowered with clear, distinct learning outcomes and incorporate asynchronous reconfigurations of support services.

Theoretical Framework

Much as how synchronous methods were, in some sense, an answer to the apparent deficiencies in asynchronous technologies, our approach reverses these roles. Synchronous learning environments seemingly wield a wealth...