Holding Remote Office Hours That Students Use

Register here

This workshop will be offered repeatedly in Fall 2020. Consult the workshop calendar for alternative times.

This event will be held remotely. Registrants will be provided with a link to join and technical requirements.

Many of us will be running office hours remotely this fall. Get concrete ideas and plan how you’ll run remote office hours to ensure your students get their needs met, and take advantage of collaborative opportunities while managing technical challenges. Office hours are a chance to establish relationships and support student success, as well as answer specific questions. We’ll explore the challenges and opportunities so that participants will have an informed approach to decide:

•  Barriers to your students attending office hours, and how to address them
•  Draft your syllabus blurb or email/Announcement invitations to encourage students to join
•  Consider various methods for structuring synchronous office hours to get students learning collaboratively, and juggle multiple questions at the same time

Please note: As it is expected that participants will be using many different platforms and approaches to their office hours, this is not primarily a tech support ‘how to’. Facilitators will be available after the workshop to offer a sandbox for you to be the moderator, and get tech ‘how to’ guidance on ideas you may have taken away (e.g. Blackboard Collaborate Ultra polls or breakout rooms, Piazza best practices).

We’ll also touch and provide further resources on:

• Technology
  • Considering asynchronous office hours (e.g. through Piazza, Canvas discussions, Google docs or other Q&A means)
  • Distributing and preserving the Q&A from office hours for all students to use
  • Your platform
  • How you’ll establish your availability (scheduling)
  • Technologies you might use during office hours for screen capture (for those common questions), virtual whiteboarding and real-time problem solving
• Making them successful
  • What are a few first questions you might ask to build relationships and support student success
  • How you will evaluate if they were effective