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Published July 2008

Synchronous and Asynchronous: What's in a Name

  Adam Nelson

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The evolution of the learning environment calls into question the traditional meanings of synchronous and asynchronous learning and requires learning leaders to reconsider their design strategies.

Synchronous (adj.): happening, existing or arising at precisely the same time.
Asynchronous (adj.): not synchronous.

I have thought a great deal about these two words. Candidly, though, it’s been a long time since I’ve truly contemplated their meanings. They’re commonplace. They’re technocentric cousins of “blended” or “self-paced.” They’re boring. And yet renewed contemplation leads me to believe that reflection on these two little words is well-deserved. Because, in reconsidering these words, I’m forced to reconsider a great deal more. The words are mile markers in the complicated evolution of organizational learning, and now is an exceptional time to look out the window.

Why these words What do they really tell us and how and when did they enter our frame of reference

I’m sure I’ll hear from the learning etymologists, perhaps even the brave soul who hunted these wooly mammoths of words and dragged them proudly into our learning camp, but in my experience, these words became the e-learning generation’s version of “classroom” vs. “video” or “real” vs. “Memorex.”

We latched on to these two words as a way to compartmentalize learning modalities, to demonstrate evolution into a dawning Internet age. It’s not that they’re bad words. It’s just they they’re unsatisfying in the way we’ve applied them: to deliver technologies vs. a learning process or organizational capability.

That being said, even as they’re currently applied, there really are best practices lumbering up from the foundation of these words. Words can create worlds, and in our world, the learning programs we design, buy or borrow nearly always use an explicit mix of synchronous and asynchronous elements (and, incidentally, symmetrical and asymmetrical — my personal favorites).

But when we speak to true best practices for integrating modalities, setting aside the world built from those words, only one really delivers results: understanding and articulating a specific future vision, evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the current organization and using both content and process to your advantage.

I don’t just mean the process of delivery as enabling technologies for asynchronous and synchronous activities. I mean using the process in and of itself as the content because process is something on its own. Oftentimes, an organization’s behavioral tendencies are affected as much through process as they are through content. Learning is a complex and wonderful beast, and we have the opportunity to wisely use whichever tentacle is in the right place at the right time. Asynchronous and synchronous should not be thought of only as delivery approaches, but as the learning itself.

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