How Do I Structure Virtual Office Hours to Promote Student Use?

Despite the value inherent in office hours, students cannot benefit from office hours if they don’t attend. Consequently, faculty waste time creating office hours that students do not use. It is essential to create and implement office hours with the unique needs of online students in mind so that faculty time is not wasted. The challenges of office hours are intensified in the remote, isolated context of the virtual classroom, but fortunately, current technology offers an array of solutions that allow faculty to adapt traditional views of office hours to meet the needs of online students more effectively.

This 20-Minute Mentor provides concrete strategies for designing, scheduling, and facilitating online office hours to maximize students’ use. The presenter will provide the most useful ways to utilize office hours and align them with students’ needs, preferences, and perspectives.

Learning Goals

After viewing this Magna 20-Minute Mentor, participants will be able to:

• Understand the reasons why students don’t attend traditionally structured office hours
• Design virtual office hours in a manner that increases student use
• Facilitate asynchronous virtual office hours
• Integrate technologies to create and implement synchronous virtual office hours

Topics Covered

• The advantages of virtual office hours
• Synchronous vs. asynchronous office hours
• Technologies for facilitating and scheduling remote office hours
• Understanding students’ use and perspective on virtual office hours
• Strategies for increasing students’ use of office hours

Audience

This program will benefit:

• Faculty, including fulltime, adjunct, on-campus, online, and remote
• Instructional designers who advise faculty
• Faculty development professionals who advise faculty

Product Code: QM20FA