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Adobe connect sessions

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One of the most striking features of Adobe Connect sessions is that they are very unpredictable.  Sometimes, I have 20 students or more and sometimes it is just one student.  There certainly seems to be very little relationship between how many have signed up for the tutorial and how many actually attend.

I have had a couple of one to one sessions over the past few days and thought that they worked well.  It meant that I was able to get to know the student and work flexibly with them.  In both cases, there were some interruptions for family reasons on the student's part and they were able to disappear for a few seconds to deal with them and then we could resume the tutorial.  It also meant that we could focus on what the student felt they needed to focus on and pass over or ignore what was less important to them.

I had spoken with friends who had been teaching online in a university where tutorial attendance was compulsory and they found this hard to visualise and they asked questions like "how do you prepare if you don't know how many students come?"  I suppose the ability to be flexible is a key part of working at the Open University.

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Patrick Andrews

Adobe Connect tutorials

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Edited by Patrick Andrews, Thursday, 13 Oct 2022, 19:04

I had my first two tutorials of the academic year yesterday.  It was obviously early in the course and I could not expect the students to know much of the course content so developing a good rapport was probably the main aim.

One seemed to do this better than the other.  In one tutorial, very few were prepared to use their microphones and this led to a slightly stilted tutorial.  It was still useful but it did not really help students to break down barriers and think of how they can support each other.

The other seemed livelier as students turned their microphones on and we were able to speak more naturally.  Unfortunately, my slides did not load (there was no problem with that in the other tutorial) which meant it flowed less smoothly than it might have done.

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