ONLINE COMMUNICATION

Asynchronous

Use of online discussion facilities to conduct a debate on a particular topic, set by the teacher. Students can contribute whenever they happen to sign in, within a defined period of time, typically one or two weeks.

Tools	Advantages	Disadvantages
Disscusion Board, VoiceBoard, Journal,Blog, Email, SMS, narrated slideshows and so on.	Allow people to connect together at each person’s own convenience and schedule.            Helpful in capturing the history of the interactions group, allowing for collective knowledge to be more easily shared and distributed.            Sharing ideas and comments.	Require some discipline to use when used for ongoing communities of practice.            May feel “impersonal” to those who prefer higher-touch synchronous technologies.            May take longer to arrive at decisions or conclusions.

 This is the video of Blog in Plain English

Synchronous

Chat room facility to take the place of a face to face meeting. Contribute is properly speaking in real time between two or more students online at the same time.

This is an example of synchronous discussion.

Tools	Advantages	Disadvantages
Virtual classroom, audio conferencing, Web conferencing, instant messaging, white boarding and so on.	Being able to engage people instantly and at the same point in time.          Discussion and dialogues.            Sharing presentation and information.	They require same-time participation- different time zones and conflicting schedule can create communication challenges.            Costly            May require significant bandwidth to be efficient.            Needs fairly good technical expertise.

This is an example of using skype in synchronous discussion.

SITUATION:

Both asynchronous and synchronous communications are very useful for students, teachers and lecturers. Asynchronous is face to face learning and synchronous is more to self-study. This type of learning help them to be more efficient and understand. These type of learning give benefits to us and also have disadvantages. But, students and lecturers still using these learning style in their life even it have disadvantages. What do you think?