Professor Dan Garcia on Holding Students’ Attention to Stay on Track in Asynchronous Instruction

Professor Dan Garcia of UC Berkeley shares how he ensures his students do not fall behind in asynchronous online classes.

Keep students engaged in asynchronous instruction

Those students who are not making class a synchronous part of their schedule start slipping behind because it isn’t part of their regular rhythm. As we’re looking to the Fall, you pre-record all of the lectures you can in advance. Learning research science says you slice your lectures into 6 minutes, where attention starts to drop off. Typically, if I take a lecture and boil it down to 6 minutes of just content, it is actually 30–40 minutes of solid class content.

Use quizzes to ensure students are paying attention and understanding concepts

Between each of these 6 minute chunks you add a little quiz that makes sure that students were paying attention. What I’ve tried to do is I have 8–10 statements that are true or false. It’s like a lock, you have to get all of them correct to get that point. I’ll add random facts that are false, and you have to get this combination lock of correct answers to get the point to show you were paying attention.