I want to express in a description of personalized language instruction that some activities are synchronous, i.e. require a person-to-person meeting in realtime (e.g. in person, telephone, video-chat, texting) but other activities are asychronous, i.e. each person can complete communication on his own time (e.g. e-mails, website posting, dialogue journals that are exchanged, reading articles, correction of texts).
Instead of "Synchronous Activities" and "Asynchronous Activities", which are technical and require too much explanation, what are two other terms that would communicate to anyone the sense that the first group requires two people to be available at the same time, and the second group does not?
None of these are satisfactory:
- "Meeting Activities" and "Non-Meeting Activities" ("non-meeting" is awkward)
- "Same-Time Activities" and "Different-Time Activities" (awkward)
- "Shared-Time Activities" and "Own-Time Activities" (awkward)
- "Meeting Activities" and "Personal Activities" (maybe)
- "Interactive Activities" and "Non-Interactive Activities" (maybe, but asynchronous activities can still be interactive [e.g. a dialogue journal that is passed back and forth])
- "At-Meeting Activities" and "Out-of-Meeting Activities" (ok, but I don't want the second group to be defined as the negative/opposite of a meeting)
- "Meeting Activities" and "Independent Activities" (this seems to be the best so far)
What 's the best way to express "Synchronous Activities" and "Asynchronous Activities" in a way that anyone immediately understands the above meanings of the terms?
Best Answer
It's not that the words synchronous and asynchronous are "too technical" for the intended meanings - they're simply the wrong words to describe interaction between people (though they are standard terminology for the two different types of communication between electronic devices).
The normal term for what OP calls "synchronous" is [real-time] interactive. I can't think of a standard word for the opposite, but perhaps something based on delayed response would do.
Per @cindi's comment below, non-interactive is a perfectly good term for person-to-person communication where any response is so long delayed it's not meaningful to speak of, for example, the flow of conversation.