Adobe Connect Community

Mary Breeze is an assistant professor in the College of Education. One of her duties is to advise students who are working on their doctoral degrees. Most of the students she works with have regular full-time jobs in public schools throughout the state. This makes it especially difficult for her to meet face-to-face with them on a regular basis during the school year. Mary heard about the desktop Web-based videoconferencing system, Adobe Connect, and decided to try it to see if using it would solve some of her logistical problems.

Mary requested an Adobe Connect meeting room from her college’s Adobe Connect contact (see Meeting Creator Licenses under Creating/Editing Meetings) and printed the documentation for Adobe Connect from the Penn State Adobe Connect Web site. Mary also attended several live open Adobe Connect demonstration meetings hosted by the Information Technology Services consultants, where she could see how Adobe Connect works and ask questions.

After reading the documentation and attending the open meetings, Mary decided to go to a computer lab, where she could log in to the same meeting on two computers side by side so she could see exactly what the Participant screen looked like as she, the Host, used the tools available in the Adobe Connect meeting room. After she felt like she understood how the meeting room looked for Attendees with different permissions (Host, Presenter, or Participant), she invited some colleagues who were interested in using Adobe Connect to join her in her meeting room so she would have some “real” Attendees to practice with.

When she had practiced enough to feel confident about using the technology, Mary invited one of her Ph.D. candidates to a meeting by e-mailing her the meeting room URL. In the message, Mary also arranged to call the student during the meeting, so that as Mary showed her how to use the Adobe Connect tools, they could talk on the phone instead of using the Camera and Voice pod in Adobe Connect.

Since the student had access to a high-speed Internet connection, Mary recommended that she purchase a headset with a microphone so they could use the built-in features of the Adobe Connect Camera and Voice pod in future meetings. Mary especially liked the fact that the student could share her Excel application so they could look at the student’s research data together in real time. Mary was able to take control of the student’s desktop and make corrections right in the document as they were discussing it.

Sharing Excel in an Adobe Connect meeting room

Mary asked all of her other advisees if they had access to a high-speed Internet connection. All but one replied that they did. Mary then arranged time to meet with each of the students in her Adobe Connect meeting room, following the same routine that she had for the first student. For the student with a dial-up connection, Mary had to continue to exchange materials through e-mail and hold “phone meetings.” It is not recommended that someone on a dial-up connection try to broadcast audio or video through Adobe Connect or share an application from his or her computer.

After several weeks of holding meetings through Adobe Connect, Mary realized that it might be useful to several of her advisees who are at the same point in their programs if they could meet with each other and share what they had learned about designing their research projects. She requested an additional Adobe Connect meeting room from her Adobe Connect contact and set it so that anyone with the URL could enter. She also set the room to auto-promote Participants to Presenters as they entered the room. During their regular one-on-one Adobe Connect meetings that week, Mary asked each of the students if they would be interested in meeting with each other in the new Adobe Connect room. All of her advisees agreed that it would be nice to be able to set up times to meet with each other to talk about their research without having to travel. Mary sent them the URL for the new meeting room and e-mail addresses so they could contact each other. The students were then free to use the room whenever they wanted to.

Meeting Room Access

Mary has found using Adobe Connect for meeting with her advisees during the school year very convenient. It gives her the opportunity to work with her students and help to keep them on track with their programs much better than the hit-or-miss face-to-face meetings and phone calls they used to try to schedule around the students’ work schedules. Being able to see a student’s written work right on the computer screen is a great improvement over the “picture this” scenarios they used to have to describe, or sending documents through e-mail and then wondering if they were both looking at the same version of the information. However, Mary realizes that Adobe Connect is not an absolute substitute for face-to-face meetings and does not plan to use it exclusively to meet with her advisees. She looks forward to being able to hold regular face-to-face meetings with her advisees during the summer, when they have more time to make the trip to her office.