How Can We Make Office Hours Better?

Abstract

Most personal student interactions with instructional staff come through office hours. Particularly in large courses, office hours are predominantly run by teaching assistants (TAs). TAs are best advantaged by support and training from more senior instructional staff, especially faculty. This Birds-of-a-Feather session will provide a forum for discussing challenges and innovations in managing office hours towards improving the student learning experience and environment by discussing ideas around (1) personalized support and mentoring for TAs, (2) technological support such as online queues and internal wikis, (3) considerations for remote teaching and learning, and (4) methods for evaluating office hours. It is hoped that these conversations may inspire transformative changes to office hours structure that lead to future educational innovations in research and in practice. While this session will emphasize TA-supported office hours, the discussion may also inspire new ideas for managing instructor office hours as well. During our session we will create breakout rooms for each topic and use a shared document where each room can take notes. After the break out session, each group will report back and create a summary of their discussion notes, which will be publicly archived at https://kevinl.info/office-hours