Adobe Connect Community

Wilbur Blue teaches a graduate level course on business ethics. The students in the course have full-time jobs and take classes in the evening. Many are required to travel as part of their jobs and often have to miss class as a result. This causes a problem for Wilbur, because he then has to provide class materials to the students who were unable to attend.

As a possible solution to his problem, Wilbur decides to try holding class using the desktop videoconferencing system, Adobe Connect. His reasoning is that this will allow students to attend class even if they are traveling. An added advantage is that it will also save students travel time, since they will be able to connect from their offices or homes instead of having to commute to the campus.

Wilbur’s course description states that Adobe Connect will be used so that students will know before registering that the class will have just two face-to-face meetings and the rest will be conducted through Adobe Connect. He also makes a high-speed Internet connection a prerequisite for registration. Wilbur is able to get funds through his department to purchase Web cameras and headsets with microphones to lend to the students for the duration of the course.

Wilbur’s course materials are designed for small group discussions and projects, so he divides the class into groups as he would if he were teaching the course face-to-face, then creates an Adobe Connect meeting room for each group to use. To make the rooms easy to access, he sets the access level so that anyone with the URL can enter the room.

Meeting Room Access

He also enables the auto-promote feature so a Host will not need to be present in each meeting room to promote Participants to Presenters. Giving students Presenter permissions allows them to access most of the tools in the room. To save time, Wilbur creates a “master” room containing the customized room layouts he has designed and all of the materials students will need for the course. Then he creates copies of the room, one for each group, using the Adobe Connect template tool. Wilbur e-mails the students the URL for their group’s meeting room.

The Auto-Promote Setting

The course materials consist mostly of short video clips followed by discussion questions and small group activities. Wilbur works with staff at the Digital Commons to convert the video clips to Flash so they can be shared through an Adobe Connect Share pod. He has all students meet as one large group at the beginning of each class session for a short period of instruction. Then the students enter their small group breakout rooms to view the video clips and complete the discussion questions and any other assigned activities. Wilbur drops in to each of the group breakout rooms during class to talk with the students and listen to their discussions. Then, at a designated time, he calls all of the students back to the large group meeting room to report on their discussions and activities. Wilbur also makes individual group meeting rooms available for students to use throughout the week to complete group homework assignments.

Wilbur's Meeting Room Layout for Presentations

Wilbur uses two basic meeting room layouts during class. One layout, which he uses for large group presentations, contains the Camera and Voice pod, the Attendee List, the Chat pod, and a Share pod. Wilbur uses this layout mostly for sharing PowerPoint presentations and the whiteboard. He included both the Camera and Voice pod and the Chat pod so he could broadcast audio and video to the students and they could ask questions through the Chat pod. Students can also indicate when they have a question or issue by using the emoticons in the Attendee pod.

Wilbur's Meeting Room Layout for Discussions

The other layout Wilbur uses is for discussions. The Camera and Voice pod in this layout is large enough for several people to broadcast video and audio at the same time. Wilbur has also included a chat pod, the Attendee pod and a notes pod in this layout.

In the Adobe Connect room he is using for large group meetings, Wilbur has given all of the students Presenter permissions so they can broadcast their video and voice as well as use the Whiteboard. Since cameras and headsets were provided through the department, Wilbur knows he can call on all of the students to participate in the discussion. During class, Wilbur calls on a group of 4 students at a time to participate in the large group presentations and discussions. Students Wilbur has selected broadcast audio and video, then they take turns answering questions and broadcasting their discussion of the topic. Students who aren’t broadcasting audio and video can ask questions and contribute to the discussion through the Chat pod and the Note pods.

Wilbur has devised a system for students who aren’t broadcasting audio and video to indicate that they have a question or a comment by entering a Q (for question) or a C (for comment) in the Chat pod. Wilbur then calls on the students just as he would in a face-to-face class. If the student has a short question, s/he can type it in the chat pod. If the question is more involved, the student can broadcast audio and video while asking the question and participating in the follow up discussion and then stop broadcasting after the discussion has ended.

Wilbur adds note pods to the meeting room stage area as different issues are brought up during the discussion – he adds one pod for each topic and enters the students comments in the pod for each topic, much like he would on a blackboard in a face-to-face class. Since Wilbur has given the students Presenter permissions for the meeting room, they are able to type in the Note pods as well and can collaboratively enter and edit text during the discussions.

Wilbur scheduled a face-to-face meeting for the first class session. During this session he had the students meet in a computer lab and showed them how to use Adobe Connect, including how to broadcast audio and video. Then, the students’ assignment for the week was to attend one of five possible office hour sessions with Wilbur to test their Web cameras and microphones. The second class session was then held using Adobe Connect.

Wilbur has planned for technical problems by asking the department’s tech support person to sit in on the first couple of meetings. The tech support person will use the Chat pod (sending private messages) or the telephone to try to help any student who has trouble connecting to the meeting or broadcasting audio and video. Wilbur would like to have a moderator for each large class session as keeping track of the activities in all of the pods at once can be a bit overwhelming, but he has no one available to fill this role, so he asks the students to help him out as much as possible and not be shy about speaking up if he doesn’t notice that they have a question, comment, or problem.

At the mid-semester mark, Wilbur asks students to write a short one or two page reaction paper on Adobe Connect and is pleasantly surprised at the positive tone of most of the papers. Several students remark that they appreciate being able to attend class even while traveling. One student in particular was very happy to have been able to attend class while on a business trip in Germany – even though it meant staying up very late at night (German time) to attend. Wilbur also gave the students a choice of continuing to use Adobe Connect for the second half of the semester or returning to the more traditional face-to-face class meetings. 100% of the students voted to continue to use Adobe Connect.

NOTE: Class situation and student feedback is taken from actual situations and feedback collected during the needs assessment and pilot phases of the project.