Executive Overview
The debate surrounding online higher education has long danced around a central tension: the friction between the absolute flexibility of asynchronous learning and the structured community-building power of synchronous interaction. This discourse reached a critical inflection point during the Online Learning Consortium (OLC) Innovate conference, when Dr. Tricia Bertram Gallant put forward a provocative thesis: fully asynchronous courses require synchronous opportunities to truly support student success.
For educators, instructional designers, and program administrators who have spent careers architecting rigorous, high-touch, non-linear online programs, that perspective landed heavily. It implicitly suggested that something vital—whether human connection, active engagement, or institutional quality—remains inherently missing without real-time, face-to-face digital presence.
However, a practice-based institutional study conducted by researchers at a regional public Midwestern university challenges this assumption. Presented at the OLC Accelerate conference, the study—spearheaded by researchers including N. Weber, Corey Davis, and M. Vick—examines how students, online instructors, and program coordinators perceive the actual role of synchronous activities within fully asynchronous graduate frameworks.
The empirical takeaways and qualitative narratives gathered from this research reveal a nuanced truth: synchronous activities are not universally rejected, but when implemented without deep alignment to the lived realities of adult learners, they morph from educational supports into structural barriers. This report investigates the breakdowns of uncritical synchronous integration, outlines five core principles for intentional course design, and re-evaluates the foundational question of when real-time demands are genuinely worth the cost to students.
Detailed Chronology and Institutional Context
To understand the current debate over synchronous components in asynchronous programs, it is necessary to trace how online education evolved from correspondence-style distance learning into sophisticated, collaborative digital ecosystems.
The Evolution of the Asynchronous Promise
When fully asynchronous graduate programs first proliferated, their primary value proposition was clear: absolute temporal and spatial flexibility. Designed specifically for working adults, these programs welcomed students balancing complex, high-stakes lives—career progression, military service, caregiving for children and aging parents, and intensive community commitments.
In these spaces, asynchronous design meant that learning could happen at the margins of the day. When the household quieted down at 11:00 PM, students logged into learning management systems to unpack complex theoretical frameworks, post to robust discussion boards, and submit high-caliber academic work. Instructors in these environments frequently report deep familiarity with their students’ intellectual passions and daily resilience, cultivated entirely through asynchronous touchpoints like detailed discussion board facilitation, personalized feedback videos, and reflective assignments.
The Spark at OLC Innovate
The cultural pushback against pure asynchronicity gained momentum on the national conference circuit. At OLC Innovate, keynote assertions that student success inherently demands synchronous touchpoints reignited a long-standing pedagogical anxiety: Is asynchronous learning viewed by the broader academic community as an inferior, second-tier modality?
This tension prompted a localized institutional inquiry. Researchers at a regional Midwestern university recognized an urgent need to move past ideological debates and investigate what the primary stakeholders—the students living the experience, the instructors grading the assignments, and the coordinators managing the programs—actually thought about mixing real-time requirements into asynchronous spaces. This line of inquiry directly culminated in the institutional study presented at OLC Accelerate.
Supporting Context and Metrics: What the Study Revealed
While the institutional study conducted by Weber, Davis, and Vick is practice-based rather than globally generalizable, it offers a vital mirror for the questions currently facing online programs nationwide. The study gathered closed- and open-ended survey responses from three distinct stakeholder groups embedded within fully asynchronous graduate and certificate programs:
- Graduate Students: $n = 50$ (representing a 5% response rate)
- Online Instructors: $n = 11$ (representing a 26% response rate)
- Graduate Program/Certificate Coordinators: $n = 5$ (representing a 22% response rate)
Despite the varied response rates, the qualitative narrative data yielded profound insights into the lived experience of program modality.
Where Synchronous Activities Add Value
Across all three stakeholder groups, participants did not outright reject synchronous interaction. When deployed with laser-like focus, real-time sessions received strong endorsement for specific, high-value scenarios:
- Immediate Clarification and Feedback: Complex theoretical puzzles or confusing assessment instructions that require rapid iterative back-and-forth.
- Targeted Community Building: High-touch moments at the very beginning of a program (such as orientations) or specialized academic milestones.
- Specialized Guest Interactions: Bringing in external industry experts or guest speakers whose schedules demand a live, interactive town-hall format.
- Complex Collaborative Projects: Group problem-solving sessions where brainstorming and rapid synthesis are demonstrably more efficient in real time.
Where Synchronous Activities Break Down
Conversely, the study laid bare the severe liabilities of adding synchronous requirements without careful scrutiny. Participants highlighted three major systemic breakdowns:
- Misalignment with Learner Realities: Forcing adult learners into mandatory live sessions directly violates the foundational promise of asynchronous flexibility. As one student plainly stated in the survey data: "I chose to complete my education at my time. I do not mind optional events, but mandatory synchronous activities may not be easy for me to attend due to work and family obligations." When live meetings are mandated, they trigger acute scheduling stress rather than supporting cognitive development.
- Access and Equity Inequities: The study exposed the fallacy that labeling an activity "optional" automatically equates to equity. Differences in time zones, rigid employment shifts, family care responsibilities, and disparities in internet reliability or hardware mean that optional sessions systematically advantage students with more privileged schedules. As one instructor noted, unmonitored synchronous elements disproportionately marginalize time-constrained or internationally located students, eroding the core inclusivity that asynchronous design champions.
- Redundancy and Questionable Value: A recurring frustration among survey respondents was the phenomenon of synchronous meetings serving content that could easily be delivered asynchronously. As another student succinctly observed: "Something that can be shared in an email, announcement, or on Canvas does not need to be discussed synchronously." When live meetings are scheduled merely because they "feel" like traditional teaching, they force participants to pay an uncompensated time tax for low-value information transfer.
Official Statements and Perspectives
The friction between real-time teaching instincts and asynchronous realities forces a reckoning among academic leadership, instructional designers, and faculty developers.
Program coordinators interviewed during the research emphasized the concept of "truth in advertising." From an administrative standpoint, if an institution markets a degree track as a fully asynchronous program, adding mandatory synchronous hurdles mid-stream represents a breach of institutional trust. Students make monumental financial and personal commitments based on the explicit promise of flexibility; introducing unexpected real-time bottlenecks jeopardizes retention and completion rates.
Furthermore, faculty developers are increasingly cautioning against designing courses based on instructor convenience or nostalgic assumptions about the physical classroom. The traditional academic impulse—equating "good teaching" with physical or digital co-presence—fails to account for the unique cognitive architectures required for effective online learning.
As pedagogical frameworks mature, official institutional stances are shifting away from viewing modality as a binary choice (synchronous versus asynchronous) and toward viewing it through the lens of alignment with outcomes. If an instructor cannot definitively articulate why a live session achieves a learning objective better than an asynchronous alternative, institutional policy should question the necessity of that live session.
Practical Principles for Intentional Design
Rather than advising a blanket ban on all real-time interactions, the research synthesized by Weber, Davis, and Vick offers five practical design principles for educators and instructional designers striving to honor the asynchronous learner:
1. Start with Learner Realities
Design choices must be relentlessly grounded in the lived experiences of the students who populate the program, rather than rooted in faculty habit or romanticized pedagogical ideals. Before scheduling any live component, course architects must ask: Who are our learners? What are their daily obligations? What did our promotional materials promise them? What will this requirement make harder for them? Pre-semester surveys regarding scheduling constraints can help determine whether a synchronous session is genuinely viable, optional, or completely unnecessary.
2. Use Synchronous Time Only for Irreplaceable Value
Synchronous minutes are a precious commodity. They should be hoarded exclusively for moments where real-time human interaction yields outcomes that asynchronous methods simply cannot replicate. If a discussion, lecture, or content delivery can be successfully mastered via a recorded video, a structured Canvas discussion board, or a collaborative shared document, it must be moved out of the synchronous window. Live time should be strictly reserved for high-stakes critique, complex team problem-solving, or interactive mentoring.
3. Protect Flexibility Through Optionality
In fully asynchronous tracks, live activities must remain strictly optional by design. Students must never be penalized—either explicitly through grading rubrics or implicitly through social isolation—for failing to attend a real-time event. Crucially, optionality must not mean a subpar educational alternative. Institutions must provide robust, equivalent asynchronous pathways (such as captioned recordings, alternative reflection prompts, or dedicated asynchronous Q&A channels) to ensure that non-attending students enjoy equal access to the core curriculum.
4. Design for True Access, Not Just Availability
Labeling an event "optional" does not magically resolve issues of equity. Course designers must scrutinize the micro-barriers of access: Are time zones being rotated fairly? Are recordings properly captioned for accessibility compliance? Can students without reliable high-speed broadband still contribute meaningfully? Utilizing asynchronous pre-session questionnaires, maintaining open post-session collaborative notes, and building multi-channel engagement spaces ensures that access is democratized across geographic and socioeconomic divides.
5. Maintain Radical Transparency About Modality
Trust is foundational to student retention. If a program is billed as asynchronous, any embedded synchronous components—whether occasional live workshops, mandatory orientation sessions, or project-specific check-ins—must be explicitly disclosed prior to enrollment. Prospective students deserve absolute clarity so they can accurately forecast whether a program’s structural demands fit within their professional and personal lives.
Future Outlook
As higher education continues to navigate post-pandemic instructional models, the debate over synchronicity in online programs will only intensify. The temptation for universities to default to synchronous video conferencing—often viewed as a low-cost proxy for active engagement—remains high.
However, institutions that wish to remain competitive and genuinely student-centric must resist this default. The research presented at OLC Accelerate serves as a timely reminder that engagement is not a byproduct of forcing people into the same digital room at the exact same hour. True engagement in asynchronous environments stems from deliberate, empathetic instructional design that respects the profound sacrifices adult learners make to advance their education.
Ultimately, the central question for the future of online education is no longer: Do asynchronous courses need synchronous sessions to succeed?
Instead, forward-thinking programs are asking: When does synchronous time add irreplaceable value that justifies the heavy cost imposed on our learners?
By demanding rigorous, evidence-based answers to that question, institutions can protect the integrity of asynchronous learning, uphold the promise of access, and foster deep, meaningful student success without compromising the flexibility that makes online education possible in the first place.
Reference Citation
Weber, N., Davis, C., & Vick, M. (2025, November). Synchronicity in an asynchronous world: What students, instructors, and administrators really think. Paper presented at the Online Learning Consortium’s Accelerate Conference, Orlando, FL.
