Humanizing the Asynchronous Classroom: A Framework for Authentic Online Learning

Designing asynchronous courses involves attention to students’ relationships, goals, access, and opportunities to contribute to shared learning. This practitioner-focused conceptual article proposes the Authentic Asynchronous Classroom Framework (AACF), informed by relevant literature and two instructors’ experiences redesigning and teaching asynchronous teacher-preparation courses at different universities. A grant-supported, comprehensive course redesign and a multi-year course redesign provided the contexts for reflection and framework development. The AACF organizes humanizing course-design practices into four tiers: Radical Instructor Presence, Student-Centered Utility, Universal and Equitable Design, and Reciprocal Co-Creation. The tier order reflects the instructors’ perceptions of implementation time and effort. Practices may support more than one tier, and instructors can address multiple tiers concurrently. Course examples illustrate responsive feedback, assignments with practical applications, attention to material costs and accessibility, and student contributions to course content and shared resources. The framework offers postsecondary instructors a structure for considering course changes while maintaining course learning expectations. Its contribution is a practice-informed synthesis of instructional priorities, guidelines, and examples. Future empirical research can examine its implementation, usefulness across contexts, and relationships with student experiences and learning outcomes. The AACF frames humanizing asynchronous design as attending to instructor–student relationships, student purposes, access to learning, and opportunities to contribute to shared learning. Its contribution is a practice-informed synthesis of these priorities into a usable framework complete with guidelines and course examples.