Strategies to motivate students in asynchronous learning

Asynchronous study has emerged as an essential feature of teaching and learning in higher education. Curriculum designers build in asynchronous activities as part of students’ journey to achieving target learning outcomes. Students who fail to engage with these activities could risk falling behind their peers.

However, our experience shows that low attendance and engagement are challenges that cannot be ignored. This is especially true for first-year university students, who are accustomed to being spoon-fed information at school and lack autonomy to take charge of what they learn and how. So, we’d like to discuss how to better facilitate students’ engagement in asynchronous activities.

• We need to move beyond the synchronous versus asynchronous debate
• THE Campus collection: Higher education goes hybrid
• Asynchronous discussions – how and why

1. Make students aware of the importance of the asynchronous elements

• Send weekly emails with an overview of the activities and emphasise how they relate to the assessments and course content. Before we started sending these emails, typically only two to three students (out of 26 to 27) completed all the asynchronous activities. After sending these emails, more than two-thirds of the students finished the tasks. These weekly prompts highlighted the importance and relevance of the asynchronous work, which motivated students to stay on track.
• Set up completion tracking for activities. Teachers can display the completion rates to students regularly during classes to make them aware of their progress. They can also establish mutually agreed reward schemes for students, offering prizes and showing recognition for excellent efforts. This introduced a competitive element, with students keen to claim a prize, adding to their motivation.

2. Asynchronous can be interactive, too

Embed interactive features within videos. One drawback of using videos is that we don’t know whether students are learning when the video is playing. Limited by their attention span, students can be easily distracted when watching a lecture that lasts longer than 10 minutes. That’s where interactive features can help. When designing asynchronous lessons, teachers can add in multiple-choice and short-answer questions. Prediction questions can grab students’ interest at the beginning; concept-checking questions in the middle of the video can ensure students know the correct answer before they proceed to the next part. This ensures students are engaged and attentive, even if teachers are not present. Many platforms enable this function. We see enhanced knowledge retention for key points when interactive questions are included compared with those without. 

3. Facilitate peer feedback 

One reason why students can be reluctant to finish open-ended questions such as essay writing is a lack of feedback. Teachers should create opportunities for them to provide peer feedback. To begin with, set aside five to 10 minutes in live sessions and put students into pairs for peer review and discussion regarding the asynchronous activities of that week. They should be encouraged to ask each other questions, seek help from their peers or check their understanding. Forums can be set up on the module page for students to post their work and comment on each other’s contributions. We incorporated formative checklists to scaffold constructive feedback. This means students can critique each other’s work by ticking boxes alongside short notes.

4. Cultivate learner autonomy 

• Encourage students to keep reflection diaries. At the end of each week, students will write down three things they found most interesting or useful from the asynchronous activities. The reflections help them consciously relate what they have learned to their existing knowledge and personal experiences, gain insights and see the value of the asynchronous study. In the first two weeks, students struggled to recall what they had learned from the asynchronous lessons. Later, they began to consciously and proactively evaluate the content and analyse how the knowledge and skills could help them, exhibiting higher thinking abilities. 
• Provide transcripts. After students finish watching the videos and complete related quiz questions, they can download the transcript. This helps students to follow the content more accurately and efficiently. Knowing transcripts will be available makes lower-level students, in particular, feel more secure that they won’t miss important information. One student confessed that after learning about the availability of transcripts, he stopped feeling that watching the video was a waste of time as he knew that, in the end, there was a way for him to check his comprehension.

Guhuai Jiang is a language lecturer and Jiayu Zhou is an assistant language lecturer, both in English for academic purposes at the School of Languages at Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University. 

If you found this interesting and want advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week, sign up for the THE Campus newsletter.