During covid, a church that I attended used Facebook live on Sunday mornings. As part of that experience, they had a synchronous chat session that anyone could write to all the time. That worked fabulously before the service because people who had moved away came to visit and were talking to everyone else. It was really fun. (Some kept talking during the service ... sometimes commenting on what the preacher was saying in real time...).
For an online course, though, I totally agree that a synchronous discussion isn't the best when there is more than two people communicating. it isn't the best choice because it is very difficult to maintain the flow of the discussion. From what I learned here, asynchronous discussions provide participants the opportunity to carefully think through what they post. This has a couple of of positive impacts:
1. It increases the quality of individual responses because the students have a chance to think through the issue prior to responding.
2. Everyone who reads the responses benefits from the increased thought that went into the higher quality response from #1, above. Thus, the participants learn from each other.
