Josh Adachi and Paul Cheng

But Why Office Hours?

A Literature Review

The office hour has long been a staple and a given of the university. It would be fair to say that even most seasoned professional educators cannot remember a time when office hours did not exist. As with everything else, the traditional office hours - where students come into the instructor’s office for extra guidance or help - was thrown into disarray with the onset of the pandemic and imposed lockdowns. As part of that process, in addition to finding remote substitutes for all other aspects of teaching, instructors were faced with the question of how to implement office hours in an online setting. Because many see office hours as vital to teaching writing, the question of exactly how to implement them in an online environment became a key and urgent question for writing instructors.

Limberg (2007) highlights the importance of office hours in general when he describes them as a “a platform where students learn something about academic or administrative business related to their university and the research community at large” (p. 179). He further explains how office hours help “build up an academic relationship in addition to the opportunities provided for by the normal teaching environment” making them “a productive platform that both participants [student and instructor] can benefit from” (p. 180). For Limberg then, the office hour “nurtures the transactional function of imparting information to students in order to enrich their academic knowledge beyond what is covered by seminars or lectures” (p. 181). Similarly, Knowles-Yanez (2016) describes office hours as “the rare opportunity to meet…students individually at the level they are currently at with the material” (p. 8) and in this way, can be of tremendous academic importance to the student and as well as the instructor, leading to the “advancement of intellectual and pedagogical outcomes” (p. 9). 

Moreover, both Lumberg and Knowles-Yanez both recognize that office hours also serve an important social dimension. Lumberg notes that “the multifaceted character of these interactions leaves frequent opportunities to emphasize the social side of talk” (177). Similarly, Knowles-Yanez suggests that office hours are important place for new students to not only practice “speaking face-to-face with adults” (8), but also serves as an important space for students to fulfill “their need for self-expression” by allowing them to “share their opinions and personal stories” (8). In this way, the office hour becomes an important area of socialization for new students within a potentially unfamiliar academic setting.

However, the question of online office hours has been less explored and less studied. As noted by Lowenthal, et. al., (2017) online courses have long relied on “asynchronous text-based communication technology” (p. 178-7) which allowed students to proceed through the course at their own pace. This approach seemed to have its roots in the “correspondence course” mode, and certainly made sense considering the parameters of the early internet. However, with the increase in and reach of broadband technologies that allow for more seamless live “synchronous video-based communication” (Lowenthal, et. al., 2017, p. 178), virtual office hours have become a real possibility. Additionally, Lowenthal, et. al. (2017) note how “there is very little literature on how to use synchronous video-based communication in online courses - and almost none on how to use it specially for virtual office hours” (p. 178). Our anecdotally-based study, along with others, will attempt to fill this gap. In this paper, we will make an argument for why virtual office hours are a key component of online writing instruction, describe how we implemented them in our classes over two semesters of remote instruction, and consider what we learned from our experience as well as suggestions for future implementation. on.

Going Online: Best Practices?

One clear sign that maintaining office hours was an important part of college instruction was the sign that universities included guidelines on how to include office hours into the remote classroom. However, even a cursory survey showed a wide range of suggestions and advice on how instructors could implement online office hours. For example, our home institution, Cal State L.A. recommends “holding office hours online for online, hybrid or face-to-face courses” using Zoom. Beyond offering technical guidance in setting up Zoom and accessing its various features, there is not much guidance on what to do during those office hours. This sort of technical advice is of key importance for faculty members who may be uncomfortable or familiar with the technology for remote teaching. We witnessed this lack of familiarity in the early days of the pandemic: just before Cal State L.A. went entirely remote, we saw a seasoned professor getting a quick tutorial on how to set up assignments on Canvas. Likewise, Central Michigan University offers a page of specific technical guidance for the instructor, offering advice on how to “embed your chosen platform in Blackboard.” Moreover, they suggest a number of different online tools that instructors can use in online office hours to “maximize learning;” these suggestions include using the Blackboard “sign up sheet” and the screen-sharing features of Microsoft Teams and WebEx. Likewise, the Stanford Graduate School of Education offers a short “guide presenting ways for instructors to make digital office hours accessible and meaningful to students.” Again, the main advice involves showing instructors (in this case through an embedded graphic) how to set up a recurring Zoom meeting for online office hours including some specific recommendations to use the “waiting room function on Zoom” to allow for one-on-one meetings with students. Again, this type of technical advice is often key to helping instructors with the logistics of setting up online office hours, but fail to make mention of specific ways to create these “meaningful learning opportunities.” In short, these guidelines help the instructor set things up on the technical side, but do not offer specific advice on the other aspects of implementation.

That being said, the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning at Indiana University Bloomington offers a more complete array of resources for implementing online office hours. In addition to technical advice for using Zoom and its different features, they also offer suggestions on getting students to attend office hours and what to do in those office hours, from group meetings to helping students manage expectations and even on how to display documents via Zoom.

What this brief survey shows us is that there is no lack of guidance for implementing online office hours in different ways. While the amount and quality of the advice given by an institution can vary, all of them presuppose the importance of office hours and encourage instructors to find a way to implement them as part of their overall remote teaching pedagogy. However, what is missing in many of them is specifically what instructors should be doing in office hours. Outside of assuming that instructors will simply be doing what they do in normally in in-person office hours, the guidelines are often mainly technical and logistical and are not really designed to address some of the larger issues surrounding both in-person and remote office hours. One of these issues is, of course, how to make the online office hour more comfortable for the student and what is missing between the two.

The Immeasurability of Office Hours

It is crucial that we continue to treat office hours as laboratories. Things as simple as sitting-posture, time-spent per session, and salutations are things that can be measured and assessed both by individual teachers, and in more rigorous institutional studies. But it is impossible to recreate and study every element of the office hour–not only is social behavior dynamic by nature, certain environmental factors are impossible to contain or replicate.

Shared Spaces: University office spaces are often shared, implying and expressing community.

Consider, for example, the physical search for the writing instructor’s office. For many, this search will bring students to a place on campus they have never been and face-to-face with an English department they have never seen. In some cases, the glow of leather-bound volumes and antique reading desks may connect the student to the grand tradition of literature. In other cases, the student may be confused to discover that the English department is housed entirely on the top floor of the Engineering building (as it is for us at Cal State LA). In some cases, the student will find themselves in a leather cushioned chair, across a mahogany desk with a professor who seems to command the respect of every faculty member who passes her door. In other cases, students may find themselves stepping over the charging cables of adjunct instructors who are sharing a room that appears to be covered in piles of paper. But whatever matrix of immeasurables a particular department finds itself embedded, visits to it impress on the student that their class arises out of a complex fabric of relationships between students and faculty and within the faculty itself. Ironically, while the professor may be more directive during office hours, office visits can act as a counterpoint to the hierarchy displayed in the classroom.

At Cal State LA (and presumably we are not alone), attempts are made to give professors space and privacy during their scheduled hours. However, necessities around the number of instructors and the amount of physical space often leads to relaxed attitudes, and students may find themselves in a situation where a second professor has an ad-hoc presence in an office appointment. The broadly positive effect of this presence can be the feeling that faculty members have come to a general agreement about what are acceptable and enlightened ways to serve students. In this way, the student enters into a larger community composed of not only students, but students and faculty and the student can see the interactions and relationships between colleagues. Moreover, at Cal State LA, adjuncts share offices with tenured faculty which provides nuance to the student’s impression of hierarchy, if not flattens it entirely. Messages are communicated in a space by the way that it is shared, and in the behavior that prevails. Concerningly, some prevailing behaviors may go against elements of FERPA, which guarantee a student’s rights to privacy. After all, the second professor may take on a full spectrum of roles, from fly-on-the-wall to hostile wizard, and while it is of the authors’ opinion that each of these may serve the student, the lack of restriction on this presence can expose the institution. Because even though most teachers would be amenable to allow a confidential conversation, the desire to maintain an atmosphere of congeniality too often acts against this need. Moreover, students may not be aware of their rights under FERPA or may be simply too uncomfortable to ask to speak privately to the professor.

The Grand Unified Hour began with the realization that all the positive effects of shared office spaces and departments were gone in the height of the pandemic. We believe that by recreating the presence of a second teacher, the GUOH helps to rebuild the culture of shared academic space. As a fortunate by-product, we have also found that some of the ethical issues of the shared office space can be mitigated through the affordances of the online environment, a point we will pick up later in our conclusions.