It is your responsibility to facilitate discourse to maintain interest, student engagement, motivation and to support students’ understanding. Facilitating discourse includes all activities and posts that “stimulate social process with a direct goal of stimulating individual and group learning” (Anderson, Rourke, Garrison & Archer (2001) )
If you do synchronous sessions, you must allow online participation. Synchronous sessions always exclude some students. Alternative time slots are optimal and you should expect the study commission to ask you to move to a different time slot. Online students should be able to work in a group with on-site students if there are group assignments. ,
Discourse that critically reflects and questions the topics are an important part of learning. Online students should have equal opportunities to participate, to interact and understand concepts and topics of the course and have a chance to team up with on-site students for group assignments if necessary. Please keep in mind that online students need an opportunity to ask questions and have a clear and reliable expectation about when and how to get an answer as they do not have opportunities to talk to you by chance in the hallway.