Maybe I'm a bit obsessed, but as far as I'm concerned, the tutorial issues continue. A 'topic based' tutorial was cancelled recently as one of the module tutors had lost their voice due to having a bad cold. I don’t think it’s going to be rearranged, so it will probably never happen.
A few days later, I had a tutorial delivered by a very
enthusiastic lecturer on ‘material worlds’, which is really just a fancy name
for chemistry, or at a stretch, materials science. The breakout room thingy
didn’t work that well, which may have been due to an upgrade of the Adobe Connect
software that happened literally only a few hours previously. It caught the
tutor unaware, and I emailed them afterwards to say how much I enjoyed the
session and how well they handled the technical issues.
A couple of days after that, I had another tutorial from
somebody who gave me every impression that they would much rather be somewhere/anywhere
else. It was cut short and there were constant references to ‘viewing the
recording’ when it was clearly not being recorded and was even advertised in
advance as such.
On a Tuesday evening, I had a ‘deep-dive’ tutorial on Energy
calculations. I fell asleep during it, but that was in no way whatsoever a
reflection on the quality of the session. I was just very tired due to the
events of the day. I watched the recording afterwards and it was very
interesting, and I learnt a lot. This tutor was one of the better ones.
A few days ago, the OU sent me an email inviting me to a Science
faculty based TMA writing workshop thingy. I logged on at 6.00pm on Wednesday as
I was told, only to discover it just involved staring at a blue captioned
screen for 2 hours. There was no audio, just silence and a few people
typing into the chatbox. It was a totally crackpot idea, but they must be seriously
desperate if they are coming up with this sort of thing if they think it helps with
student success.
I had a Python tutorial on Thursday evening by one of the
better tutors which was way above the level needed for TMA02/Python 1 and I
think some of the audience were confused no end, but others really positively
engaged with it. This tutorial clashed with a poorly advertised ‘skills
tutorial’ on the ethical use of Gen AI which never took place, without any
explanation as to why this was so.
I had quite a useful tutorial on how to tackle TMA02 at the
somewhat inconvenient time of 9.00am on a Saturday morning. The tutor was very
good, and I suspect leaned towards the tradiola end of the touchy-feely/reflective
learning spectrum of approaches to education. The tutorial started very well
but lost its way in the middle with this breakout room malarky which seems to
be becoming a fashionable trend. The last third of the session seemed a bit rushed and,
in my opinion, some key points were glossed over.
The quality of the Associate Lecturers and the usefulness
of the tutorials on this module is definitely variable to say the least, but in
fairness the same could be said for most traditional 'brick' universities. It
is, however, very much of a lottery.