Office Hours at a Distance

In my experience teaching in higher ed, few students take me up on office hours. Partly I think this is due to my discipline (Education)--it's probably more likely that students in other disciplines like Engineering, or Math, or History might capitalize on the individualized learning opportunities provided through office hours. 

The basic intent of "office hours" is that I set aside a few dedicated blocks of time each week in which I am hanging around in my office, ready and willing to work with individual students on their questions and concerns about course material. But is this a waste of my time if no students show up? (I can say with confidence that it is never wasted time...I always have something else I can work on if no students show up.)

One thing I've tried recently is rebranding office hours as "student hours." By explaining it to students as "I'm here for you, students, and I'm always glad to meet up with you," it seems like I've had a slight upswing in the number of students who drop by. But overall, it's still a small number.

I have a couple of colleagues who have taken a different approach: they encourage their students to just sign up for a time slot to connect. Some are using youcanbookme.com, and others are using the Bookings tool within Office 365--both work great for this sort of thing. You can designate available hours for students, and they can sign up for a time as needed. This eliminates that "sitting around and waiting for students to show up" (I joke...I'm never just sitting around!) because students are deliberately adding a calendar item for themselves and their professor in question.

And this kind of approach works pretty well for both face-to-face and online student hours: you can schedule a Zoom or Microsoft Teams meeting really easily this way too.

But how about for fully online courses? Honestly, in the almost 10 years I've been teaching online, I think I've had three (three!) students show up for a webconference meeting during my scheduled office hours. That seems like a pretty demoralizingly small number doesn't it?

But one of my professors-turned-professional-colleagues, Patrick Lowenthal, gave me an interesting idea. Patrick suggested that maybe office hours needs to be rebranded: "office hours" doesn't sound like something many students would want to attend. And perhaps even "student hours" doesn't work well for this. In one course I took with Patrick in my doctoral studies, he hosted "happy hour" (no drinks required) as an interactive online learning experience. We had "warmly-welcomed-but-not-required" webconferences several times during the semester--basically online office hours. But here's the thing: most students in the course attended. We wanted to be there! 

And so I've taken this approach into my own distance teaching repertoire now. I regularly now hold warmly-welcomed-but-not-required synchronous meetings for most online courses I teach. (This might sound like it's flying in the face of my last post, which argued for asynchronous learning, but I think this is an example of using webconferences judiciously.)

Here are a few tips for how I manage these meetings, which might give you some ideas of how you might incorporate these into your own online teaching:

• I explain the purpose of these meetings as clearly as I can: they are an opportunity to get clarity on key topics for the course, to ask questions about assignments and course content, and to build up our community of learning.
• I limit the meetings to not more than one hour. (This is key! Zoom fatigue is real...)
• I try to always have a brief agenda. My typical agenda looks something like this:
• Check-in/opening circle - how are things going?
• A brief lesson/update/further explanation of a key idea from class
• Questions and answers - about assignments, course content, etc.
• Closing encouragement - previewing assignments to come, giving group feedback, etc.
• Depending what is going on in the course at a given time, I sometimes invite students to share their work-in-progress for informal feedbacking from the learning community. This has been a mixed-bag for me; sometimes it goes really well, sometimes less well. I think that if I were to do this again in the future, I would have some clearer protocols in place for how we share and how we provide feedback. 
• Students are not required to attend these meetings, but I do want to provide equitable learning opportunities for all students in the course. In this light, I always record these live sessions and share the video with the students so they can catch up on what we talked about.
• Depending on the course and the group, I might have these kinds of synchronous sessions on a weekly basis (more common during the compressed summer term, where students appreciate the condensed support of a one-hour weekly meeting) or scattered throughout the term every few weeks (more common during a fall or spring term, where it might be more difficult to get everyone together regularly.) I don't think there is one right way to do this, and I'm continuing to experiment with what works well for this approach to "office hours at a distance."

In my end-of-the-term feedback surveys, I usually include some sort of item along the lines of, "What aspects of the course really helped you learn?" Many students specifically name these synchronous meetings as a key part of supporting their learning. While many students express their appreciation for the asynchronous structure of the course overall, they see the value in these optional live meetings for the efficiency, the immediacy, and the opportunities to develop relationships with their professor and their colleagues.

A screengrab from a meeting with some of my grad students this past summer.
(They really are the best!)

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(This post is part of a series offering tips on distance teaching. You can read more about this project here: Distance Teaching Tips. You can also read all of the posts in this series here: Distance Teaching Tips Series.)