Hold office hours with Teams

Teams can be a useful solution for connecting with students over private video or audio-only conferences. A solution has been to create a dedicated space (a channel) in which students indicate interest in office hours via chat and common questions can be responded to publicly.

The other option would be to create a recurring meeting, and then invite students to said meeting when they express a desire to meet.

Creating an Office Hours Channel

1. Visit the course Teams space

2. Select the ellipsis icon next to the Teams site name at the top of the window. Then click Add Channel

Open

3. Add details of your office hours. The Channel name should display office hours clearly so that students understand when timing for making contact is appropriate. Click Add.

Open

4. Advise students to switch to this channel when the appropriate date and day occurs and type within the chat space that they wish to meet during the office hour.

Connecting with Students through Teams

Instructors can meet with students using a video or audio-only call through Teams. This can be done directly from the Office Hours channel if need be.

1. Click upon the icon of a student that has indicated interest in meeting for your office hour.

2. Within the menu which appears, initiate a video or audio call by clicking the camera or phone icons under the user’s name.

Some things to consider

• Establish clear boundaries around when you intend to watch the chat area in the meeting space, as students may not immediately understand that you are not monitoring at all times

• Make clear to students that chat indications of interest in an office hour meet will be regarded as a queue. Time stamps are present for all chats and are visible to all members of the course's Team space

• This strategy can be undertaken for multiple courses, though note that a separate channel may be needed in each course's Teams space

Creating a Recurring Meeting

Instead of creating an additional channel for office hours in their Teams site, instructors may instead prefer to make use of a recurring meeting. CPI outlines how to create a recurring meeting, which instructors can follow to set up a meeting that occurs every week during their office hours.

Upon creating a recurring meeting, instructors will most likely want to enable the “lobby” function on the meeting. This means students will enter a lobby, where they will wait for you to accept them into the meeting. This can be done by editing the meeting, and selecting Meeting Options.

From here, instructors can set it so only Organizers can bypass the lobby, meaning students and guests are sent to the lobby to be accepted at the instructor’s preference.