Automated Synchronous sessions for asynchronous online courses
This kind of delivery gives students in completely asynchronous online courses options for participating in a Learning Catalytics session simultaneously with other students who are taking the same course. You specify multiple time slots for participation, and students sign in for a session that is convenient for them.
You don't need to be present for these sessions—Learning Catalytics takes it from there.
During each session, Learning Catalytics uses automatic pacing to deliver each question in an automated fashion (based on your predetermined sequence and timing settings), and it determines whether the participants would benefit from peer discussion of each question, based on their responses. (You set the grouping thresholds in advance in course settings.)
If a discussion is warranted, Learning Catalytics automatically places students into chat sessions for groups of concurrent participants. Students benefit from articulating why they answered as they did, and then the question is delivered again for them to answer in a second round.
Important: When you add multiple time slots to a module, the Learning Catalytics Gradebook creates a column for each one. For example, if you create three start times, there will be three columns in the Learning Catalytics Gradebook. A student's score is in the column for the session in which the student completed the module; the other columns display 0 (zero) for the student's score. If you plan to download the scores, you may want to edit the .csv file to remove the zero scores.