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The purpose of this paper is to create a “go-to-guide” of best practices in the creation of asynchronous courses. Due to the global pandemic, millions of students around the world transitioned from in-class instruction to online programs, which ranged from completely synchronous classrooms to completely asynchronous classrooms. Students were forced to learn how to engage within an online classroom environment with minimal notice and instructors were abruptly thrusted into a different operational environment, with many required to construct educational ecosystems in an unfamiliar and digitized interface. This led to several actions and the utilization of a multitude of different teaching techniques, many of which were poorly implemented.

Key words, “Asynchronous learning”, “Learning”, “Feedback”, “Online Instruction”, and “Classroom Design” were searched in online data bases (Google Scholar, PubMed, EBSCO and Data Base of Open Access Journals). These then were read by the authorial team and authoritative papers were selected by the team based on the frequency of utilization by other papers in the field and the utility of these papers for the design of asynchronous courses.

This paper explores asynchronous learning from the perspective of how instructional science and learning science can be applied to create the best classroom for both pupil and instructor.

It looks to provide a go-to-guide for best practices in asynchronous learning and the development of K-12 classrooms, graduate and medical school classrooms and finally continuous medical education classrooms. Finally, this guide looks to facilitate the development of master instructors through statements on how to properly provide feedback to students.

Organizations are confronted with problems and political risks to which they have to respond, presenting a need to develop tools and frames of understanding requisite to do so. In this article, we argue for the necessity of cultivating “political judgment” with a “sense of reality,” especially in the upper echelons of organizations. This article has two objectives: First to highlight how a number of recent interlinked developments within organizational analysis and practice have contributed to weakening judgment and its accompanying “sense of reality.” Second, to (re)introduce some canonical works that, although less in vogue recently, provide both a source of wisdom and frames of understanding that are key to tackling today’s problems. We begin by mapping the context in which the need for the cultivation of political judgment within organizations has arisen: (i) increasing proliferation of political risks and “wicked problems” to which it is expected that organizations adapt and respond; (ii) a wider historical and contemporary context in which the exercise of judgment has been undermined – a result of a combination of economics-inspired styles of theorizing and an associated obsession with metrics. We also explore the nature of “political judgment” and its accompanying “sense of reality” through the work of authors such as Philip Selznick, Max Weber, Chester Barnard, and Isaiah Berlin. We suggest that these authors have a weighty “sense of reality”; are antithetical to “high,” “abstract,” or “axiomatic” theorizing; and have a profound sense of the burden from exercising political judgment in difficult organizational circumstances.