Student engagement is a central concern in all educational environments, whether face-to-face, remote, or hybrid. Engaging students in a time of added turmoil and social upheaval while still in the midst of an ongoing pandemic is a real challenge. With so much going on in the world around us, it’s easy for any of us to lose focus on courses and course content. While I won’t suggest that anyone tune out current events pretend that nothing is happening, I think this shared struggle offers a way to connect with students in a way to which they may be more receptive.
Office hours is a great place to do this. A lot of us have a tendency to perform a “teacher persona,” often a different version of ourselves, as we teach in a full group setting—I definitely do. While this can be beneficial in setting up a particular dynamic in the classroom, for some students, this can be alienating. Because of this, those students may not be as willing to participate in class discussion aloud. Office hours is a great space for alternative participation; you get to speak to students one-on-one and build a relationship with them that you might not otherwise be able to in a full group setting.
While the impulse to not hold firm office hours and to just have students contact you directly might make sense to not have consistent chunks of empty time in your calendar, those benefits do not necessarily stretch out to students. The intimidation of sending an email to a professor can be daunting for many students, especially those who may be less outgoing.
To make things easier, there are a variety of programs and online tools that you can set up in order to make scheduling office hours appointments more streamlined for you and your students. Some of those include:
Overall, these four programs all have the same basic operation, generating automatic appointments (of a duration that you set) for students to reserve. Please note that YouCanBook.me and Calendly are external programs that are not licensed by the University.
YouCanBook.me connects to your calendar allowing for booked appointments to automatically populate into your calendar for you. YouCanBook.me integrates with Google Calendar, Office365, Outlook, and iCloud, to keep all of your booked appointments in one place. Additionally, you can set up YouCanBook.me to link with your Zoom account for additional ease of access. Here are some short videos by the creators of YouCanBook.me that describe more of its features and how to get started:
Introduction to YouCanBook.me
Get Started with YouCanBook.me — in 3 minutes!
Like YouCanBook.me, Calendly offers integrations with many digital calendar platforms, including Google Calendar, Outlook, Office365, and iCloud, to make your available appointments seamlessly fit into your existing calendar without creating an extra place to have to look for your meetings. While it is a good tool, and many faculty enjoy it, I find that it’s a bit clunky because of its orientation toward overall workflow, rather than being limited to strictly scheduling. If you wanted to do something a bit more robust than simply schedule office hours, like coordinate project steps with TAs, then Calendly might be right for you.
In Google Calendar, you can set up a block of appointments on your calendar that other people can reserve. For example, faculty can invite their students to reserve time during office hours each week. Appointment slots are useful when you don’t know who needs to meet with you, but you want to make yourself available. You can offer people a block of time on your calendar that they can book time slots within. When students sign up, their name automatically is part of the title of the meeting. This is especially convenient because it’s automatically integrated into your Google Calendar. If you don’t use Google Calendar, you can still sync it with other external calendar programs in order to view your scheduled meetings.
On Canvas, you have an individual calendar that pulls all of the events and assignments from each course that you’re a member of into one central location. On the left side navigation menu, you can select “Calendar” to access it. On the top of the screen, you can toggle views between a week view, a month view, and an agenda view. The agenda view allows you to view everything on your calendar and scroll through more seamlessly than having a view that is restricted to a certain time frame (week or month). To the right of those options, is a “+” button that allows you to create new events, assignments, to-do list tasks, and appointment groups.
Under the “Appointment Groups” option, you can enter your availability to create a series of appointments, of whatever length you set (30-minute windows, 15-minute windows, etc.) that students can reserve. These appointments will integrate into the rest of your Canvas calendar for you to view. You can adjust your Canvas notifications to receive email or push notifications when you’ve got new reservations, but right now, the Canvas calendar does not automatically integrate with existing external calendars. While it doesn’t do it automatically, it can still be done by adding the Canvas calendar into your Google Calendar (or other external calendar) manually via URL. Please note that because it is not automatically syncing, there can be some delays. Some users have reported up to 24-hour delays in the calendar syncing.
If there’s an app that you’d like to see covered in the Technology Rundown, please feel free to submit suggestions to me, Brandy C. Williams [brandycwilliams@uchicago.edu]. Other resources available from Remote Humanities include other informative posts, including interviews with faculty, and the Online Pedagogy Assistant (OPA) Program (and meet the OPAs).
