What is Asynchronous Learning?

“According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”

-Jerry Seinfeld

 

People hate public speaking because mistakes happen in real-time. We can’t delete something we regret saying to a live audience. All of the factual errors and verbal tics are part of our presentation, like it or not. When your students record their presentations using VoiceThread, they can keep trying until they nail it.

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In addition to revising and editing drafts, VoiceThread enables students to record and teachers to assess presentations on their schedule. Live presentations take up valuable class time.

Even when teachers assign group presentations, it might take weeks to complete them all. That means most students are passively consuming information instead of actively learning new concepts. These ideas are core to the rise in popularity of the flipped class, but they apply to every educator in the modern world.

VoiceThread helps us make presentations better and easier at the same time. That’s asynchronous communication and that’s why VoiceThread produces higher quality than real-time tools.