Designing Asynchronous Lessons for Remote Learning

This page is part of 🧰The Toolbox by Danny Smith.

If you need to create a simple series of asynchronous “lessons” – perhaps as part of your employee onboarding experience – this guide offers a few tips for how to do that well. I’d recommend reading about 🎓How Learning Works before going further with this guide.

What’s an Asynchronous Lesson?

When we say asynchronous lesson we mean something like what you’re reading right now… a written document that learners are expected to read. A lot of the tools in this toolbox started out as asynchronous lessons in various courses.

Unlike synchronous lessons or workshops, async lessons are designed so learners can complete them whenever they choose. They're particularly well suited to delivering information, which frees up any synchronous time to focus on discussion, exploration, discovery and thinking together.

In this document, we'll look briefly at some of the principles and conventions I’ve used when building this type of lesson.

Principles

We have three main principles for writing async lessons.

1. Written word first - Reading and writing are fundamental skills for remote working. We want our lessons to be examples of high-quality documentation. So we default to written content.
2. Be predictable - Learners shouldn't have to work to understand our lessons. Being predictable with things like structure & formatting make this easier.
3. Encourage reflection and action - Although async lessons are often about delivering information, we should take every opportunity to encourage action and reflection on the part of the learner.

Lesson Structure

Each lessons should include some basic “frontmatter”. If you created your lessons in a Notion database or similar, you can include this as database fields. It should include stuff like expected completion time in minutes, links to the relevant learning outcomes and perhaps a category. The body of each lesson should generally follow a standard format...

1️⃣ The Beginning

This is about orienting the learner and introducing the lesson. It should always include a box describing the goal of the lesson, which should usually be followed by a few paragraphs introducing the subject and explaining what we'll be covering. In some cases, it might also include prerequisites and and required pre-work (like setting up an account on a particular tool).

2️⃣ The Middle

This is where we "teach" new material. The format of this will differ depending on the content we need to cover, but we generally try to break things down into a series of sections which flow well together. Where possible, we want to take the reader on a journey through these sections.

A well designed section might include:

• An initial reflection exercise to help the learner feel the problem themselves.

Eg. "Think of meeting you attended where you felt uncomfortable. List a few reasons for this"

• A mini introduction to the section.
• A series of sub-sections explaining various concepts, tools, practices or principles.
• Images, diagrams or videos to support your message.
• Worked examples.
• A practical or reflective exercise to help learners internalise and integrate what they've learned. Often this involves reflecting and sharing with others in a tool like Slack.
• A mini summary of the key points in the section.

Repeat this kind of format for each major concept or “chunk” of information in the lesson.

3️⃣ The End

Every lesson should end with the predictable format...

1. Summarise what's been covered and reinforce any key points. We might include a final activity or suggestions for how to apply this learning immediately.
2. f part of a course or learning journey: provide a look forward to other lessons where this learning will be important. Eg. "We'll build what we've learned in this lessons when we start looking at how to run decision meetings."
3. Provide optional further reading in the form of links, videos and documents.

Exercises, Asides and Other Media

Whatever tool you’re using, it’s a good idea to establish some formatting conventions for exercises, asides and the like. For example…

You might also see embedded youtube or loom videos, or links to other resources. Sometimes these are supplementary to the main content, in which case they'll always have a caption explaining what they are and will usually be set to the right hand side.

Sometimes they'll be an important part of the main content, in which case they'll usually be full width and will be preceded by an instruction like "Watch the video below" or "Read the article below".

Writing Engaging Lessons

It can sometimes be hard to write engaging async lessons like this. Here are a few tips that can help:

• Tone of Voice - Keep a friendly tone of voice. We want the reader to feel like they're having something explained to them clearly and concisely by a friend.
• Use Consistent Formatting - Stick to conventions about formatting and make the lessons easy to scan by using headings, lists, tables and other visual elements.
• Keep it Short - Try to keep lessons to under half an hour for the average reader, including exercises. This isn't always possible but it's a good thing to aim for. This often results in lessons that are about one specific thing, which is usually good. If you have larger lessons, consider splitting them down.
• Keep it Active - Where possible, ask students to do stuff as they go through the lesson. This might mean configuring a tool or changing some settings or writing a list or recording and sharing a video. Don't always save this sort of activity for the end of a lesson.
• Use a variety of media - While we should usually focus on written explanations, use video, diagrams and links to external documents to add some interest to your lessons. But only do this where it adds to learning - random images and videos do more harm than good!