Help me schedule office hours

September 22, 2005 6:23 PM

I'm just starting to teach in a college class for the first time. Is there an online application I can use to schedule my office hours?

Here's what I want to do. My office hours are Tuesday between noon and five. I want to give my students a link to a page where they can sign up for a half-hour block of my time. Once one student has signed up, that time is blocked off and no other students can sign up for that time slot.

I've looked around at a few online calendars, but they've all been to huge and complicated for this simple task. I also looked at Pointment, but it wants everyone's meeting time to converge on one time when everyone can meet. I want the exact opposite. Plus, it makes everyone register--the ideal app would let anyone sign up for my time.

Any ideas out there?

posted by josh to computers & internet (9 comments total)

I've never used it, but mysignup.com seems to do what you want. (Warning: annnoying talking web page).
posted by bac at 6:31 PM on September 22, 2005

I taught college for two years, and we were required to have a certain number of office hours per week. Hardly anybody ever showed up, but they seemed to like knowing that they could find me outside class. Students liked being able to drop by, even if it was just to ask me where a certain campus building was. Sometimes they would just need five minutes of my time, other times they spent an hour.

From what I'm saying, I hope it's clear that I think requiring appointments for a time you're going to be there anyway, and then only allowing them to be a certain length, isn't the best idea. It seems like way too much effort for something that will just work itself out on its own.

Also, what if more than 10 students need to see you on a given day?
posted by elisabeth r at 7:01 PM on September 22, 2005

Second on the not-needed-to-maybe-bad-idea. I've never been to Harvard, but at Duke this would have been completely over the top crazy unnecessary.

Are they making you have 5 hours of office hours? 'Cuz that's a lot. If they're not making you, cut it to 3 tops and get your own work done.

If it's a time of the year where you might actually expect to be busy -- right before a paper is due, right after the kids didn't get the grades they deserved on an exam -- just put up a plain, physical sign-up sheet.

What useful thing do you think you'll get from having them do it online instead of on paper? That might help guide folks to better answers.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:22 PM on September 22, 2005

Okay, here's a more elaborate version of what's going on:

I have two teaching appointments this fall: one for an English department course, and one in the Kennedy School of Government, where I'll be working as a writing tutor. For the English class, I'm just holding regular office hours, with no sign-up sheet (excluding certain weeks when I'm going to require that students see me in office hours).

In the Kennedy School writing tutor job, however, I'm in a different situation. There what's happening is that students are emailing me with requests for appointments. All of them have different schedules, so some of them will only be able to come at different times. In order to keep the total workload manageable, I'm limiting each student to 30 minutes. There are a lot of students who want to sign up for writing help.

What I'm doing is setting aside a fairly large chunk of time each week for writing tutor office hours. I'll be there from 12:30 to 5 o'clock every Tuesday. Rather than emailing back and forth with every student, I'd like to automate the process of signing up for hours. Students who haven't made appointments can just drop by and wait if they show up during a block of time that people are there.

Unfortunately, because I'm a graduate student in the English department, I don't have a mailbox or anything like that in the Kennedy School, and the room I'm using for tutoring is not my own--*and* there are various irritating bureaucratic issues involved--such that it's difficult for me to simply put a sign-up sheet on the door. Even if I could, though, I think it would be easier for students to simply sign up on the web, since they're all getting in touch with me via email anyway.
posted by josh at 7:48 PM on September 22, 2005

Just a suggestion: wouldn't 15 minute blocks be more useful? That way students with short questions can book 15 minutes, and you can set a max of 30 minutes (so they can book two slots in a row, but no more)

I'm only making this more complicated, I know.
posted by easternblot at 8:10 PM on September 22, 2005

If you let students make appointments like that, then you are setting expectations that the time is absolutely reserved for them. What if they are running late, so you start helping another student and they show up 3 minutes later? Do you boot the unscheduled student out? How long do you wait for someone to show before you help someone else, who is invariably standing at the door staring at you doing nothing? What if students book and then don't show? Doctors' offices have to implement pretty draconian rules to deal with people who don't always do things according to schedule, but have high service expectations. One falter in people management and your evaluations plummet.

What I am saying is that a web based schedule is like a promise to the student, when at most you want to make a "pretty sure". It's the difference between working with them and serving them. My recommendation is to keep an unofficial schedule by email. It'll probably slow down as the semester goes on anyway.
posted by dness2 at 8:52 PM on September 22, 2005

(I teach, but perhaps obviously not writing)
posted by dness2 at 8:54 PM on September 22, 2005

I'm willing to bet that KSG types are different, and mean it when they make appointments. In any case, I don't think josh needs to worry about his evals from KSG, in the sense that they're not going to help or hurt his job prospects for tenure-track English jobs.

That does indeed sound like a real pickle, and I don't know of any software offhand that will do that.

Do you have teched-up friends who can code you a page that does that? I don't really know php or perl from a wet aardvark, but that sounds like the kind of thing one of them ought to be able to do without too much fussing. Could you browbeat KSG into assigning one of their techoids to do something like that?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:30 PM on September 22, 2005

Kiko? It's an online calendar app, and it's free.
posted by geeky at 7:06 AM on September 23, 2005