Tutorials for Topic 1

Had my first tutorial on Saturday of last week. About 40 punters attended and we were put in a number of breakout rooms with 4 students in each room. We worked collaboratively on a few calculations but we run out of time. An hour isn't really long enough for this audience participation malarky. This was a double handed session with one tutor doing most of the speaking and the other doing a bit of Adobe Connect admin. For a first tutorial, it went well, and I'm surprised there were so many people there on a Saturday morning, which is traditionally not a popular time. 

There was a similar event Tuesday lunchtime with two different tutors, one that I remembered from SM123. It was, as advertised, the same as the Saturday event using the same slides. The third and final tutorial was even more similar to the first one because it had the same two tutors as the Saturday one. The one big difference was it was poorly attended compared to the first two, which surprised me because evening tutorials are usually the most popular times, given the choice. There's no advantage to attending more than one of these identical tutorials, but I did anyway, just to see for myself the similarities and differences.

This is not the message you want to see when enrolled on a distance learning course, but in fairness it was due to recently discovered PHP security vulnerability that affected many different websites worldwide. The OU uses Moodle which runs on PHP so it was inevitable that this remedial action had to happen quickly without warning. Access was restored in a couple of hours so all was not lost.