We sat down with Velma Zahirovic-Herbert, Professor of Real Estate at the University of Memphis. Following 15 years at the University of Georgia, Velma has spent the past 3 years at Memphis teaching fully asynchronous courses. We’ve had countless professors ask us for insights from our experience working with Velma, and we decided to take an hour to sit down together and walk through her advice and best practices.
At the University of Georgia, I mostly taught traditional lecture-style classes. Right before the pandemic, UGA moved to a hybrid and then fully asynchronous format. Over the last 10 years, I've experienced all versions of online delivery, from hybrid to synchronous to entirely asynchronous courses. Although my current courses are asynchronous, their structure is guided by the time allocated to each learning module, considering the material's difficulty and coverage.
My experiences with different course deliveries and classroom setups helped me develop ideas about what would work. A particular challenge is keeping students engaged without regular face-to-face interaction. Scheduling learning modules with traditional due dates for assignments became crucial.
At the beginning of the semester, I give students more time for easier modules to establish expectations, encourage communication, and build familiarity with the course setup.
Just like in a traditional classroom, students learn through repetition, so making sure that each module is set up in the same way helps students know what to expect. I believe that consistency in module structure helps students know what to expect. For example, each module starts with a brief video introduction that provides an overview of what we will study in the next one to three weeks.
Yes, there is not as much flexibility to adjust the curriculum as there would be in an in person setting. Some students move faster than others, and you can't decide midway through the semester to cut material or add more because it takes a while for students to then adapt to that change.
Because of that, I recommend being detail oriented. Spend more time ahead of the semester laying out the course carefully, knowing that you might have to adjust some aspects, but that you’ll be limited to how many changes you can realistically make.
That said, I have never been resistant to making changes semester-to-semester based on students’ feedback. If I have couple of students that are very active, I email them frequently to ask questions about the layout of the course, the assignments etc.
I ask questions like, ' How do you like the setup?’ and ‘Would you like to see something different?’ I do this throughout the semester, every semester, for every class. Responding to and incorporating that feedback has made my courses better laid out and easier for students to absorb.
Regardless of the class format, building an understanding of crucial material in each module is important. The introductory videos that set up each learning module are very effective for this purpose. I also incorporate current news or stories from popular press articles to help students connect course concepts to real-world situations. Announcements and emails in Canvas help convey this information. For example, I'll send an announcement before each new module and follow up with a relevant newspaper article a few days later.
Students respond well to the relatability to everyday real-world issues. I carried this kind of material over from in-person and hybrid courses because often, in these settings, I would read a newspaper story right before entering the classroom and would start the lecture by telling students about what I’d just read, which would relate to the material being covered in class.
In a traditional face-to-face class, you get instantaneous feedback. You can see when students are confused, and you can respond in that moment.
In an asynchronous classroom, you don't have that opportunity. Outside of the questions you receive, the way you assess whether concepts are explained well or not is by looking at students' performance on assignments.
But most students do things at the last minute, so even that kind of feedback comes very late in the learning module, so planning well ahead of time, and making sure that all assessments are organized throughout the module in a way that you are receiving continuous feedback on the material is important.
For example, I might think that it takes two weeks to go through an investment module in a Principles class, but the fact is that most of my students who take that course are in their first or second year and not all of them are familiar with the TVM or NPV calculations, so they need longer than other students.
So, for this class, making sure that the first module reviews the math needed for that concept gives me the opportunity to see the pace I need to go for students. Assigning the exercises so that you can follow student progress is important because you must respond to whatever feedback you get on their performance; otherwise, you're just measuring their performance and not ensuring that there is some value added beyond that.
So if I want to see how well they did and respond to, for example, correct mistakes that they're making, it takes a lot of time, and once students move into the next module, they're not interested in going backwards, whereas in an in-person class, you can go back through material from previous modules easily; you can come into the class and say, ‘okay, today we’re going to take 30 minutes to go back over this one particular calculation that majority of you missed in the quiz…’. They're then forced to sit with you and do it, but if you do it in an asynchronous class, it requires that they click on a video, and the likelihood that they’ll engage with a video that recaps material is much lower.
That's why planning is so important. You need to know how much time is needed for students to understand the material, and then to reinforce the learning objectives. In practice, this means that I typically give my students much less time to go through modules that are more focused on memorization and much more time on the modules that are more focused on the application of knowledge and calculation.
Engagement is crucial. Even in online classes, a small percentage of students may not engage, but we can still provide opportunities for those who want to participate. Establishing a focus on understanding the course structure and communication at the start of the semester is key.
The big one that comes to mind is guest speakers.
In many courses, students learn not just from an instructor but also from listening to industry professionals. This is true for both upper and lower-level courses. It’s important to expose students to all areas of real estate. Surveying my Principles of Real Estate students in the beginning of the semester, most of them think that the real estate field is about being a realtor or real estate agent, and so I spend the teaching semester telling them that it is not; it's about real estate investment, real estate financing, property management, valuation and just about everything else from law and ethics to Prop-Tech. Guest speakers highlight the diversity of the real estate field, from investment and finance to property management and valuation. They expose students to various real estate careers beyond being a realtor.
So, bringing guest speakers into a Principles class is important, because it shows our discipline has much wider range than just being an agent or flipping houses.
Bringing guest speakers in upper-level courses is as important, if not more so, because it allows students to hear people in different careers talk about how knowledge of topics like Real Estate Investments and Finance was useful in helping them build their careers. My speakers often talk about what specific concepts or skill areas are important for graduates to master while in school. It could be the tech-y aspects of valuation, understanding performance, or even soft skills.
So, that is typically a missing component in online classes, and here I have to give a shout-out to Blended Teaching, as it makes it easy for me to provide a similar experience to the students.
That said, I think this can be done without it, though professors may have to spend more time and effort on their own building of the courses to incorporate guest speakers.
My courses use Blended Teaching-prepared learning modules. I typically create introductory videos on covered material and conduct Zoom interviews with guest speakers. These interviews provide students with fresh perspectives and keep them engaged. Blended Teaching's professional videos, along with practice problems, discussions, quizzes, and exercises, enhance this experience.
My students love these because by the mid-semester, they're getting tired of my lectures, and they're excited to see somebody else. They also really love to hear from another professor who is at Clemson, or San Diego, or Central Michigan. It doesn't matter where exactly. What they value is the fact that their education is global, and in all honesty, the material that my peers present is done so better than I would be able to because it's not an area I specialize in.
More specifically, I start my learning modules with an introduction I create about what’s covered in the material and what we will learn. I also record conversations between myself and the experts who have recorded the content and use that as an introduction to the guest speakers.
So, to summarize, one of the biggest challenges is introducing guest speakers to your students in a fully online asynchronous class. It can be difficult, but it's not impossible. I've benefited quite a bit from Blended Teaching in that regard and my students found it to be very valuable.
It can be done without Blended Teaching; I could have reached out to many of those professors, and asked for their short videos, but it would have been a different kind of content because Blended Teaching’s videos are professionally recorded, and they come with relevant text as well as practice problems, discussions, quizzes and exercises.
Seeing students attend a class in person doesn't mean they're actually engaged. A lot of those students who would come to my class in-person would be on their computers on a messaging app or even watching shows with headphones in, so you don't know whether they're really engaged in the course or not. The same can be true with an asynchronous class.
Having a timeline of activity is a helpful starting point for creating an engaging learning experience. Just because it’s asynchronous, it doesn't mean you turn assignments in whenever you feel like it. It just means that you study at your own pace, so it’s important to set expectations clearly.
Forcing engagement doesn’t tend to work particularly well, so I’ve moved away from that approach towards one that’s focussed on making the course material more interesting.
Here’s an example - the Ford Factory opening outside of Memphis. I shared an article with my students about Rivian cancelling their plans in Georgia and then asked them for a quick write up on what a decision like that would mean for Ford and Memphis. I can then provide these incentives for students to encourage engagement, like giving the first 10 responses an extra five points.
Every semester is a bit different depending on the course you teach and the students you have enrolled in the class. Teaching real estate Investments, for example, to a fourth-year undergraduate class, is also going to be a bit different than teaching them at the master’s level.
It’s not just the content; it's about keeping students engaged and understanding the value of the material. What’s much harder to prepare for is meaningful assessments. These ones move away from multiple choice to ones where you can return valuable feedback.
One assignment from which I learned a lot about students is asking them to make a presentation. I ask for a three- to five-minute presentation that they post on Canvas. It gives me an opportunity to hear students, which is something that's missing in an asynchronous class compared to an in-person class.
Hearing students is just as important to teachers as it is for students to hear their educator, which is why we record ourselves lecturing in an online class instead of just giving them a textbook and saying ‘here are the assignments’. We go through the extra effort to record ourselves delivering the material, and we engage in Zoom calls and Zoom office hours.
So to summarize, setting clear timelines and expectations is crucial. Encouraging engagement through interesting course material works better than forcing it.
It’s important for us as teachers to hear students so we can see how they are progressing through the material they're studying. So, using a presentation-style assignment at the mid-semester point has been good for me to learn about what students are understanding.
It's one thing to write something that you have perhaps copied, but it's a whole other thing to think conceptually about what you need to say and make decisions about how to present it.
The result is that you can better judge what students are actually understanding, and what they're not. I encourage people who are delivering asynchronous courses to think beyond written assignments or multiple-choice type of quizzes, and into the realms of other communication methods and mediums.
There are other effective ways to communicate. I've started using audio messages to students. If they message back and I send them an audio message in response, they’re more likely to engage back in an audio message because they don't want to write a half-page email asking me for help with something they're confused about.
.png)
Voice memos are easier to engage with for both me and them, so creatively thinking about how to engage students, not just visually, but using audio has been good. I've learned a lot from it and I'm already enjoying how much more information I can gather from it.
I promise, if you leave a voice memo for a student, either on canvas or in their inbox, they're going to be much more likely to respond using the same approach, and they will give you more information about what they don't understand.
99% of the time they start by saying ‘I hate asking this stupid question’. If they believe that the question they have is stupid, they're going to be less likely to ask it anyhow and to take the extra effort to type it out - it's much more discouraging for them to do so.
So, communicating via voice memo makes it easier for them to ask, and it makes it easier for me to respond.
Incorporating a feedback loop throughout each module is essential. Zoom office hours before a project are well-attended, but summary sessions after a project are not. Regular, consistent feedback throughout the module is key.
For anyone wanting to stay up to date with Velma's work, you can connect with her via LinkedIn here.
.png){kind=small}