Does the provision of an `own working space’ for tutors enhance the learning experience for students

• Project leader(s): Hayley RyderTacey O'Neil
• Theme: Technologies for STEM learning
• Faculty: STEM
• Status: Archived
• Dates: January 2018 to February 2024

Adobe Connect has replaced OULive as the OU’s online tuition delivery tool and the current university plan is for tutors to work in shared online rooms for cohort/cluster-wide events. There is significant concern (particularly amongst tutors) that this will not work well since Adobe Connect rooms appears to be designed around the assumption that each room is controlled by a single individual. However, it is also not clear that individual rooms (that are accessible by students outside the tutor’s own group) can work with LEM. For this presentation on M303 we have permission to trial individual rooms for tutors that are open to the whole cohort of students (about 150 students). We hope that providing an individually `owned’ virtual workplace for tutors will enable them to feel more confident about using Adobe connect (if they are nervous about the online tuition) and to be more innovative if they are already confident.

This trial will investigate whether individually owned learning spaces acts as an enabler and results in tutors feeling more confident about tutorials. As a result, the University will gain knowledge about whether individual rooms are a viable alternative to shared ones. We will do this by using semi structured interviews with tutors to ask what they did in their AC rooms during the presentation (and whether they could have done these things in a shared room) and to evaluate how they felt about using the individual work spaces on M303. Using semi structured interviews will enable us to dig down into any individual innovations tried by the tutors and investigate why they felt able to try this on M303 (i.e. did the ownership of the space make a difference).