Not occurring at the same time; for example, a discussion in an online forum may not result in participants engaging at the same time as each other. Asynchronous learning is a general term used to describe forms of education, instruction, and learning that do not occur in the same place or at the same time.
The term is most commonly applied to various forms of digital and online learning in which students learn from instruction—such as pre-recorded video lessons or game-based learning tasks that students complete on their own—that is not being delivered in person or in real time. Yet asynchronous learning may also encompass a wide variety of instructional interactions, including email exchanges between instructors, online discussion boards, and course-management systems that organize instructional materials and correspondence, among many other possible variations (The Glossary of Education Reform, 2014).