Office hours, blocks of time designated for faculty and student interaction outside of any regularly scheduled class sessions, are routinely incorporated into university courses (Briody et al., 2019; Hsu et al., 2022). Such sessions are often semi-structured and optional for students, allowing faculty to provide customized support to individual learners when needs arise. This form of faculty-student interaction can support academic achievement, retention, and engagement (Griffin et al., 2014; Guzzardo et al., 2021). That office hours attendance is often at the discretion of individual students, however, can result in underutilization of this valuable supplement to required course sessions and contents (Briody et al., 2019; Griffin et al., 2014; Smith et al., 2017). The purpose of this blog is to delineate empirically guided strategies for optimizing the inclusion of office hours in university courses. In particular, we focus on office hours hosted online, as the online modality can be advantageously employed not only for courses delivered online but also for those delivered residentially.
Invite students to attend office hours at the start of the course and follow up with reminders throughout the term.
One reason students may underutilize office hours pertains to feelings of intimidation or discomfort (Hsu et al., 2022; Smith et al., 2017). While such sentiments may be particularly apparent for in-person office hours (Hsu et al., 2022), they may also negatively impact attendance rates for online office hours. Directly inviting students to attend office hours early on in the term, such as through a course announcement, can serve to reduce anxiety and promote participation. As the term progresses, remind students that you welcome and look forward to their attendance.
Such communications can be further bolstered with specific recommendations for how students can use office hours. Research on perceptions of office hours has shown that students may recognize fewer benefits of or options for office hours than do faculty (Hsu et al., 2022). Explicitly highlighting use cases can serve to increase student recognition and appreciation of personally applicable possibilities for these sessions.
Establish a regular schedule that accounts for student preferences and needs.
Setting a routine schedule for office hours helps ensure that students can plan accordingly for attendance. Insofar as possible, align the schedule you select with student preferences. While accommodating all scheduling preferences may rarely be feasible, students frequently cite scheduling conflicts as a primary reason to forgo attendance (Hsu et al., 2022). With this in mind, consider providing students with a list of timeframes that would suit your schedule and then surveying the class to determine which option(s) best suit the most students.
As the course progresses, you might also consider checking in with students to determine whether their originally reported preferences have remained stable or evolved over the term. Of course, your scheduling needs may also change. If and when updates to your office hours schedule are required, provide students with alternatives when possible and as much advance notice as is feasible.
Clarify format and expectations.
Office hours are often one of several tools employed to augment the required components of a course and support faculty-student interaction (Briody et al., 2019; Smith et al., 2017). Guidelines and structure for office hours can also vary considerably from course to course. Accordingly, it can be beneficial to clarify how office hours will be used in your course. If you plan to have students sign up for individual sessions within a preset time block, for example, ensure that the instructions for doing so are readily accessible.
In addition, communicate what office hours should and should not be used for. Discussing assignment feedback may be a prime use case for office hours while time-sensitive questions about assignment requirements, for example, may be better suited to a course Q&A forum. Developing and sharing corresponding guidelines with your students can help facilitate efficient and productive patterns of communication.
Use the questions and discussion topics that emerge during office hours as a source of information to guide whole-class communications and course updates.
Office hours can provide valuable insights into student experiences within your course. After each session, take time to reflect on the questions and topics that surfaced most frequently. Then, consider whether other students who did not attend might benefit from access to the information shared. Outcomes of office hours can also inform course updates. For example, you might revisit and modify assignment instructions with which students struggled or add supplemental resources about topics in which students expressed interest.
References
Briody, E. K., Wirtz, E., Goldenstein, A., & Berger, E. J. (2019). Breaking the tyranny of office hours: Overcoming professor avoidance. European Journal of Engineering Education, 44(5), 666–687.
Griffin, W., Cohen, S. D., Berndtson, R., Burson, K. M., Martin Camper, K., Chen, Y., & Smith, M. A. (2014). Starting the conversation: An exploratory study of factors that influence student office hour use. College Teaching, 62(3), 94–99.
Guzzardo, M. T., Khosla, N., Lee Adams, A., Bussmann, J. D., Engelman, A., Ingraham, N., Gamba, R., Jones-Bey, A., Moore, M. D., Toosi, N. R., & Taylor, S. (2021). “The ones that care make all the difference”: Perspectives on student-faculty relationships. Innovative Higher Education, 46(1), 41–58.
Hsu, J. L., Rowland-Goldsmith, M., & Benaksas Schwartz, E. (2022). Student motivations and barriers towards online and in-person office hours in STEM courses. CBE: Life Sciences Education, 21(4), 1–14.
Smith, M., Chen, Y., Berndtson, R., Burson, K. M., & Griffin, W. (2017). “Office hours are kind of weird”: Reclaiming a resource to foster student-faculty interaction. Insight: A Journal of Scholarly Teaching, 12, 14–19.