Remote Workshops
Asynchronous Communication card, MethodKit for Remote Workshops
Card 2 of 63 · MethodKit for Remote Workshops
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Close & follow up

Asynchronous Communication

Chat & build community between sessions

Chat and shared spaces keep the workshop alive between the live calls.

Asynchronous communication covers everything that happens outside the live session: the messages, the shared documents, the threads where people continue thinking. In a single-session workshop this may be a brief window before and after. In a multi-day programme it is where most of the learning actually consolidates.

Online groups have a particular tendency to go completely silent between sessions. In a physical programme people bump into each other in the corridor, over lunch, at the coffee machine. Online those casual touchpoints vanish unless you build them deliberately.

Online, specificallyThere is no corridor online, so the community you want to exist between sessions has to be built by giving people a named place to go and a reason to show up there.

In a remote session

The same building block as it plays out online: how experienced facilitators tend to handle it when the room is a screen. Illustrations to react to, not rules to follow.

Open a channel early

Good facilitators set up a Slack, Teams, or WhatsApp group before the first session and make it easy to join during the onboarding, not at the end when people are already gone.

Give it a first prompt

They seed the async space with a concrete question or task so people have something to respond to, rather than leaving a blank channel and hoping someone posts first.

Bridge live and async

They reference the async channel during the live session ('share your outcome in the thread afterwards') so the two channels feel connected, not separate.

Keep it low-pressure

They frame async participation as optional but useful, never as homework with a grade, so people contribute freely rather than feeling monitored.

Questions to plan around

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

  1. What platform will people use for async communication, and will everyone already have access to it?

  2. What will you post first in the async space to get things moving?

  3. How will you make sure people know the async channel exists and what it is for?

  4. How will async contributions feed back into the live sessions?

  5. How much facilitation does the async space need between sessions?

What trips people up online

  • A channel nobody posts in makes the community feel more dead than no channel at all, so seed it yourself before expecting others to start.
  • Mixing async participants and live-session participants on the same thread without clear norms can create confusion about what is expected from whom.
  • If the async space asks for too much effort (long posts, complex tasks), people will not use it, especially if they were already busy when they registered.