Tools and technologies that are asynchronous in nature support a form of communication where the sending of a message and the reception of the message are separated by a time delay as opposed to occurring in real time. The use of asynchronous technology in education goes back to the mid-1800s when universities began to offer correspondence courses with print and written documents as the primary mechanism for communications between instructors and students. As a result, print and written correspondence was and continues to be used to support communication where instructors and students are geographically separated and where one-to-one exchanges in communications are delayed, intermittent, or distributed over time. This entry defines asynchronous tools and technologies and discusses frameworks used to categorize them.

From an historical and ...