Including an Office hours page within Canvas facilitates professor-student interaction.
The resource page comprises several components, including a brief 5-minute video explaining
office hours, a video screencast demonstrating how to access online office hours via
Zoom, a Calendly link enabling students to schedule ad hoc meetings outside of designated
office hours, and a series of reflection guides.
These reflection guides are designed as checklists, allowing students to self-assess
their planning, implementation, and evaluation of their learning in various significant
course activities. These practices can be applied to a broad range of courses, ensuring
that the grading system aligns with the course's intended goals without adding unnecessary
complexity. The ultimate goal is to provide clarity and simplicity in guiding students
through their learning journey.
Strategies and Tips
- Using existing templates in Canva or other design software makes the design process
very easy.
- Canva has a lot of different applications within an online course – you can use it
for a slide deck, for creating a banner, or for creating handouts (example: reflection
guides)
- Using a script allows for easy captioning. Screenpal (formerly Screencast-o-matic) has an option to record from a script and then use
the script for captions.
- After uploading the videos to Panopto, using the HTML code to embed the video into Canvas makes it easy to add a page.
- Adding a banner for the page that aligns with the design scheme of the rest of the
course can provide additional visual interest.
- Entering regular availability into Calendly can help a professor avoid back-and-forth emails on scheduling. You could also add in availability on a daily or weekly basis. Calendly will then send an email when a student signs up for a time slot and you
can add it to your calendar.
Tips for Building Community:
- Put your office hour date, time, and location in your email signature
- Put your office hour info on reminder slides at the start and end of class
- Have students retrieve your office hour info (and space it out) on quizzes
- Ask questions and listen. Not sure what to ask? Ask not just what they’re majoring
in, but why.
- Create "teaser" topics. Something come up in class that would be fun to discuss, but
you don't have time? Give students a teaser and tell them to come to office hours
for more.
- Reinforce the benefits of office hours in class.
- Play music. It sets the tone and it's a great conversation starter
Retrieval Practice: 10 quick tips
|
Research
Office hours can provide a means for
- supporting social and teaching presence per the Community of Inquiry framework (Garrison & Arbaugh, 2007).
- Synchronous office hours in an asynchronous class can help improve teacher-student
communication, although technology needs to access the platform and scheduling concerns
need to be taken into consideration (Gibbons-Kunka, 2017).
- In addition to supporting student needs, McGrath (2014) found that a model of office hour plus structured reflection improved academic performance
in the course.
- Self-regulated learning models contend that learners are active and engage in a cyclical
process whereby they consider a range of personal, behavioral, and environmental factors
as well as feedback from previous performance to develop and execute a learning strategy
(Zimmerman, 2000). Specifically, as discussed by Zimmerman (2000), learners engage in a process of
forethought (e.g., task analysis, goal setting), performance (e.g., self-observation,
self-control), and reflection (e.g., self-judgment, self-reaction). The reflection
guides in particular leverage the self-regulation model to encourage learners to meet
their goals through a systematic process of learning.
|
Resource: Office Hours 
LC4 - Facilitate Discourse 
QM5.3: