Office Hours

Even in a hybrid course, and particularly when the demands of the Coronavirus pandemic place extraordinary demands on you and your students, holding accessible office hours for your students is critical.

There are (at least) two primary considerations for office hours: technological and pedagogical.

Technological Considerations

Technologically, in addition to in-person hours, Zoom and the telephone are the most common.

• The telephone obviously provides the most accessible method and should probably always be an option.
• Zoom offers not just a visual experience that provides some of the benefits of in-person office hours, but screen sharing too, which is often an improvement over looking over each other's shoulders.

Some Effective Practices

If you offer Zoom office hours, you might double your time investment by using the same Zoom sessions for your telephone hours by reminding students that they can connect using telephone only and promoting the phone numbers found in your Zoom meeting description and invitation.

For Zoom office hours, scheduling a recurring meeting throughout the semester is preferable to using your personal meeting link or your class session meeting link. If you use your personal meeting link, students might connect during non-office hours, making that standing meeting's intent as an ad-hoc space more challenging.

A dedicated office-hours meeting can be shared and displayed easily in the Zoom section of your course along with other class meetings...and there will be no confusion on anyone's part about the location of meeting recordings .

Pedagogical Considerations

Merely having office hours and making students aware of them is enough to meet the letter of requirements, but not necessarily enough to make such hours fruitful in the sense of the spirit that motivates providing them.

In particular, research has shown Links to an external site. that:

Students are most likely to perceive office hours as the last resort they can turn to when an academic crisis (e.g., an anticipated failing score) is on the horizon, rather than as an institutional resource that may be regularly used for a broader set of fruitful interactions with faculty members. To correct this mismatch between students’ perception of office hours and institutional intention, we argue that students need explicit guidance about what office hours are intended to do: they need accessible models of what office hours can offer and how to make use of this resource.

Students are often reluctant to ask for help, and this tendency can be exacerbated when they meet with you in person or even not at all.

The paper by Smith, et al. Links to an external site., goes into much more detail about both why students are often reluctant to follow up on office hours and how to deal with the problem, the latter of which we share here as bullet points before further reading:

• Share with students, explicitly, the purpose of office hours beyond simple help on assignments or when in trouble.
• Openly, proactively, and routinely promote those office hours.
• Embrace, to the extent possible given time and technological expertise, methods of meeting students where they are. This doesn't necessarily mean using every technology or being available all the time with that, but as your course is a hybrid, so too can these tools (chat, direct message, Slack, etc) be integrated in a hybrid fashion.