The Power of Synchronous Sessions in Distance Education: Building Community and Resilience in the Age of COVID-19

Abstract

AbstractWe draw on Bourdieu’s work on the sociology of education and introduce the idea of building social capital and community in the often-misunderstood, one-sided narrative of online learning, which is seen both as an isolated and isolating experience. We also look at educational praxis, which is “informed, committed action,” to address socially differentiated educational attainment—perceived to be more pronounced in online learning. To this end, we think that the field of distance education would benefit from a discussion of the significant value gained from adding synchronous sessions to online courses that are otherwise asynchronous, particularly for teaching research-based and analytical subjects at the graduate level. To investigate this, we perform a narrative analysis of qualitative data from student evaluations of five online courses taught within the past two years where we introduced regular synchronous sessions. Our findings indicate that synchronous sessions, especially during the pandemic, were perceived by students as cornerstone of a pedagogy of care. Further, these sessions work better than fully asynchronous courses for students who are prone to lower educational attainment due to prior conditions (e.g., SES, race) because of the added layer of support. Finally, our findings indicate that these sessions represent one, effective way for students to build social capital and community in courses that are otherwise fully asynchronous.KeywordsDistance EducationOnline EngagementCommunity Building