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Christopher Douce

Empty room recordings: developing a consistent approach

Thursday 20 November 2025 at 08:49
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Edited by Christopher Douce, Thursday 20 November 2025 at 08:51

On 18 November 2025, Rob Moore ran a session about using Adobe Connect to make effective empty room recordings. This is something that I have done from time to time. My main reason for attending was to pick up some useful hints and tips and gain reassurance that what I have been doing was sensible.

What follows are some notes and reflections that I’ve made both during and after the session. I've written these notes with fellow tutors in mind. During the 'points' section that follow, I also share my own opinions and experiences, adding to the great points that Rob shared.

Why are empty room recordings useful?

Some important advantages were highlighted: they focus is on the listener, they are shorter and there are fewer distractions.

In my own tuition practice, I’ve used them to introduce, and to go through bits of technology. For example, I might do some screensharing to highlight particular functions of a bit of software. From the student’s side, they can skip over the bits that they know about, and focus on the bits that are new to them.

When screensharing, a useful point being that tutors can optimise the screen resolution for the task. This is an interesting point. Rather than using a higher resolution screen (that was recommended), I tend to make use of a lower resolution screen setting. This means that the recording that I make can be accessed from different types of devices, such as laptops, tablet computers, or even mobile phones.

Points

During the session, I noted down a number of points that you need to consider when preparing for an empty room recording. I have added a couple of my own tips:

  1. Where is it going to be? Which room? Is it in the module wide room, the cluster room, or the tutor group room? Will the students know what room it is gong to take place in?
  2. After the recording has been made, give recording a meaningful name. Remember to make it visible, and decide on the time when is to be made available to students.
  3. Your slides will need to be shared, and there needs to be some agreements with the module teams, staff tutor, or cluster manager about how this is done.
  4. Your slides will need to be lightly customised for empty room tutorials; remove any slides that relate to ice breaker activities or interactive elements.
  5. For a recorded tutorial, get rid of unnecessary pods, such as the attendees pod and chat pod. Use a layout that has a share single pod that is maximised to the space you have available.
  6. If there are information dense parts of a tutorial, such as case studies, you can go through these very quickly and efficiently. Tell students you are doing this. When students play back recorded sessions they can pause on particular slides, and rewind the recording.
  7. If you want to turn your web cam on, you can use the ‘pop out’ feature.
  8. Recordings have the potential to be used across presentations. For this to be possible, you might have to export a recording as a different file type, and work with a staff tutor or module team member to make it available to different presentations.
  9. If you haven’t made an empty room recording before, consider making a trial recording. This way you learn what you need to do.
  10. If you do any screen sharing, it is a good idea to make sure that the screen has recorded as expected.
  11. Use the highest quality microphone you have available. Make sure that your microphone is working. Do an audio check before you start, especially if your computer has multiple microphones.
  12. If you are co-hosting an empty room tutorial with a fellow tutor, it is important to prepare. These can become more like podcast chats, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Consider framing module materials as a debate. Consider taking a position on some of the module material, and have a constructive argument with you co-presenter. Also, decide who manages the slide transitions.
  13. If you need to make any edits to the recording, make sure they are really simply. Only do simple cuts if you need to. Anything else takes too much time, and life is too short.
  14. Finally, don’t worry if the recording isn’t perfect. We are not aiming for a broadcast quality recording with very high production values. Some rough edges are okay. If you are demonstrating something technical that and you make a mistake, this may emphasise that you are working with difficult concepts and ideas.

Reflections

This was the second CPD event that I attended on the day. It did get me thinking about the role of empty room recordings, or pre-recorded tutorials. One thought I did have was whether these could help to prepare students for ‘live sessions’ which relates to the idea of the ‘flipped classroom’ that was once fashionable.

Decisions about the module tuition strategy does, of course, sit within the module team. This relates to the observation that different modules have different practices. If you have ideas about how tutorial recordings might be used, and have the potential to add pedagogic value, the thing to do is to talk to your friendly staff tutor.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Rob for running a helpful session. Acknowledgements are also extended to the AL professional development team.

Tags: Adobe Connect, tutorial recordings, AL development, empty room recordings, empty room, tutorials
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Christopher Douce

Student Interaction and Collaboration in Tutorials: Why, What and How

Sunday 17 November 2024 at 15:00
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On 13 June 2024 I attended a seminar that was run by three colleagues from the School of Maths and Statistics: Cath Brown, Vinay Kathotia, and Abi Kirk. The seminar was intended for ‘anyone interested in the development of online teaching’.

For anyone finding this blog post, it might be useful to view this summary alongside other posts about Adobe Connect , tutorials, and online pedagogy.

What follows are some brief notes that I made from each of the presentations. For concision, I have taken the liberty of abridging each of the titles. Some reflections and acknowledgments are shared at the end.

Why should we promote students working together?

The subtitle for this first presentation, which was facilitated by Vinay Kathotia with Cath Brown was: what are the pedagogical and broader benefits?

A useful term was introduced: student-centred pedagogy. Student adopting an active role during a tutorial can mean increases in confidence and self-efficacy. Interaction can be as simple as students making points, listening, arguing, and responding to a tutorial.

These points can be connected to ‘inquiry based mathematics education’ where collaboration has the potential to lead to higher levels of inclusion. There are some advantages of collaboration: mathematics is a collaborative activity. Through tutors demonstrating mathematical thinking, students can see that mathematics can be messy.

I noted down the phrase: “community enhances attainment”. Community can relate to the study of a module, and anything that helps to develop community, but is also useful is important.

We were asked a question: what were everyone’s experiences? How do we convince the students it is a good idea for them to come along to tutorials? Perhaps writing can be useful; asking students to write an account of what happened during a tutorial, is one approach that can facilitate sharing and suggest the benefits of tutorials.

The design and structure of collaborative tasks

The second session was facilitated by Abi Kirk. The full title of this second session was ‘some ideas and examples on the nature, design and structure of collaborative tasks’. The presenters described some collaborative tasks they have used for tutorials: small-group problem solving (which takes place on M337), and ‘pub quiz’ group work.

In the pub quiz activity, students were put into breakout rooms where they have access to five questions. In each room, students record their answers. This then leads to a plenary session which is facilitated by a tutor where all the results are shared using an Adobe Connect whiteboard.

A question was asked: how could collaboration using breakout rooms work in your context? One thought is to giving information in advance; perhaps it is important for everyone to know what is going to happen in a tutorial. There is an inherent tension of giving them too much in advance. Making a session look enticing and interesting is a skill all of its own.

Technology to enable collaborative work

The full title of this session was ‘technology to enable collaborative work - Adobe Connect and beyond’. In this session we were introduced to a variety of different Adobe Connect features and maths tools the presenters have used, such as GeoGebra, Desmos and PolyPad. Different subjects will, of course, necessitate the use of different tools. What I might use as a computing tutor will, of course, be different to what a maths tutor may use.

You can, of course, use features within Adobe Connect, such as screensharing, file sharing and polls with external tools and utilities. In some tools it is possible to create multipart activities, for example, and share URLs (web page links) with students through a text chat window.

One other idea is to open a shared Microsoft OneNote notebook. Any OU student can use it through Office 365. It can be used as a whiteboard where student can share their work. Control could be given to students, where they could interact with mathematical text.

Towards the end of the session, we returned to the topic of breakout rooms. They are pretty complex, which means that it is important to make sure you have a solid understanding of the interaction metaphors that are used. Tutors need to know how to set up and move between different layouts, how to adding and deleting breakout rooms, how to start and end breakout rooms, how to communicate to all rooms, moving between rooms, and combining results from different rooms together in a virtual plenary space.

Reflections

Quite a lot of time has elapsed between attending the seminar (June) and making these notes available (November). This means that there is risk that the sessions may not be summarised as accurately as I would have liked them to be. This said, I hope the points that I have shared are helpful, and apologies to the facilitators if I have misrepresented anything.

I went to this session since I hold the view that student interaction through online tutorials is important, but I also have the sense that it is very difficult to do well. This session was of specific interest since there are some key similarities between maths and computing: both subjects work with textual notations. With maths, there are equations (and whatever mathematicians do); within computing there are programming languages.

I do feel that there are multiple structural and technological barriers that are put in everyone’s way before interaction can become possible. More often than not, I don’t hear any student voices in tutorials, since no one really knows anyone. I remember that a book called eModeration by Gilly Salmon emphasises the importance of digital socialisation. In the currently tutorial world, where students can attend any number of different tutorials by different tutors, the tentative social connections between everyone works against interaction and collaboration. I don’t know what the solution is.

Using distance learning technology to facilitate interaction and collaboration is difficult. I don’t know where this comes from, but I’m always minded that perhaps digital educators have to become digital media producers and performers. To be good at digital performance, rehearsals are essential.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to all facilitators.

Tags: tutor guide, online tutorials, Adobe Connect, student interaction, student collaboration, interaction, collaboration, maths, mathematics
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