Online Office Hours: a quick start guide
Online Office Hours: a quick start guide |
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In general, most of us highly value the in-person classes and personal contact that NAU is known for. Still, not all of the "online adaptations" we put in place during the COVID-19 crisis were terrible. Many students have pointed out that online office hours were actually *more convenient* than traditional in-person ones, as they are doing their homework at home and appreciated the ability to pop in and ask a question without having to trek over to SICCS. So I'm keeping that going forward! Note that I will often (though likely not always) be in my actual physical office for these, so check with me if there is a real need for a face-to-face and we can set it up.
A major reason for office hours is to discuss things: what you career plans are, what issues you are having in your class or Capstone team, or some problem that you are stuck on. What I'm saying that it's usually *a conversation*, requiring more than a few typed sentences you might send by email. At the same time, it's not efficient to keep a Zoom room (and connection!) open full time during office hours... waste of bandwidth. So we pioneered the following tiered solution in Fall 2020 and it worked great:
If you don't already use Slack to communicate with your various working groups, you should learn it now. It's a wonderful tool used for team communication by many thousands of software (and other!) companies out there. It has desktop apps for all the major platforms, as well as mobile app versions.
I have created a Slack workspace to serve as my virtual office. Here is the invite link:
https://join.slack.com/t/drdoffice/signup
Please use your NAU email address when you sign up, rather than some random email. This is set to auto-accept and signup anyone from the nau.edu domain!
I will monitor this Slack workspace during the office hours posted for on the course website. I can't be available for office hours 24-7 (!!), so don't expect me to be monitoring the Slack channel at other times.
You can start by Direct Messaging (text) me over Slack. Depending on what you need, we can then switch to an audio/video conversation. What we can NOT do (since I don't have a paid Slack account) is to share screen or have a whiteboard to sketch on, etc. But if we need that, we can easily go to...
Slack is great but it's not supposed to be a full video conferencing app; it does not have whiteboards and, (in the free versionat least), and does not support multi-person video conferences or screen sharing. If we need any of this fancy stuff (not unlikely), we can fire up Zoom, where we'd have all the features of Zoom: sharing screen, a shared whiteboard, etc. We will generally use the following Zoom room for this:
CS315 Zoom chat room
https://nau.zoom.us/j/348771449?pwd=YlprYytmSXQzSjZSNlJlUTFlbTRpUT09
Meeting ID: 348 771 449
Password: 161068
This seems like a reasonable and flexible solution that efficiently gets the job done without introducing too many new apps/tech to deal with. Of course, we won't hesitate to think up something new if it turns out too clunky. Please let me know if you have suggestions!