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:
- 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?
- 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.
- 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.
- Your slides will need to be lightly customised for empty room tutorials; remove any slides that relate to ice breaker activities or interactive elements.
- 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.
- 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.
- If you want to turn your web cam on, you can use the ‘pop out’ feature.
- 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.
- If you haven’t made an empty room recording before, consider making a trial recording. This way you learn what you need to do.
- If you do any screen sharing, it is a good idea to make sure that the screen has recorded as expected.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.