Practical considerations for following up

The follow up that you may choose to do after facilitating your synchronous online session likely will vary depending on the purpose of your session and the content and activities of your session. It also may vary depending on whether the session was "standalone" - an event in and of itself - or part of a longer, asynchronous course, and whether there were people absent that need to be caught up on anything that happened in the session.

Here are some more things to think about:

Sending out a link to the session recording

If you recorded your synchronous session, sending out the link to the recording is a time-sensitive follow up task. Especially if the session contains information that is either "nice to know" or "need to know" for your participants in order to be able to proceed with the rest of an asynchronous course that the session is a part of, sending out the recording link soon after the session is important. It may also be a good idea to:

  • highlight key messages of the session in your follow up email or discussion forum post to give your participants the "quick and dirty" of what was discussed/happened
  • include actual timings of when key events happened in the session so that participants can find them easily if they should review them

You may even want to go as far as converting the session into an. mp4 file and chopping it into smaller pieces for your participants to review - it's up to you! Note that in some platforms, such as Blackboard Collaborate, the conversion to the .mp4 file splits the various parts of the session into pieces and only what was visible on the whiteboard is shown in the .mp4. (Some of the "Synchro Sessions" in Week 2 are examples of what this looks like, e.g. Hassan's, Megan's sessions etc.)

Sending out additional resources

During your session did you (or someone else) promise to send out additional resources after the session? Were any documents or URLs posted in the chat area for all participants that should be shared with others who weren't at the session? These additional resources may also be important to capture and send to participants in an email or discussion forum post after the session.

Additionally, if you used a PowerPoint deck for your session, you may wish to send this out to your participants.