Online Synchronous Instruction: Challenges and Solutions

Most of the online courses nowadays are offered in asynchronous mode, enabling students with the freedom of time and distance. Nonetheless, the drop-out rate for online courses is high. With online synchronous instruction students have both freedom of distance and punctuality of regular progress and the drop-out rate is found to be greatly reduced. However, there is a lack of online synchronous teaching pedagogies in the literature for teachers. This study aims to identify major issues that need to be considered in online synchronous instruction environments using observations of real online synchronous instruction in a physical setup. This paper then recommends some pedagogical guidelines for effective online synchronous teaching.