Conclusions: What It All Means

The Grand Unified Office Hour (GUOH) began abruptly and without a plan to measure its efficacy. We believe that an office hour intentionally shared among faculty provides unique opportunities to open the space of the university to students taking an online course.

Patrick R. Lowenthal, Chareen Snelson, and Joanna Dunlop’s (2017] study “Live Synchronous Web Meetings in Asynchronous Online Courses: Reconceptualizing Virtual Office Hours” offers guidelines for developing synchronous meetings in the context of an asynchronous class. These guidelines, created as a result of the study, can be more intentionally implemented, while the architecture of the study can be co-opted as well. Lowenthal, et.al. (2017] offer several areas in which online office hours can be reconfigured.

The first element of their architecture emphasizes the notion of “rebranding,” literally changing how office hours are referred to. According to Lowenthal, et. al., (2017] rebranding office hours can create a more welcoming environment and students might feel “more at ease to ask questions as they arise” (p. 181). To that end, “the Grand Unified Office Hour” may ironically instill a sense of fun informality; however, it might not achieve the greatest sense of ease to students taking the “grand” label literally. The emphasis remains on the idea of the “office hour,” and as Lowenthal, et. al., (2017] argue, “further work can be done on this end” by anybody employing an office hour with multiple professors present, one that perhaps deemphasizes the imposing nature of the event. 

In addition, Lowenthal, et. al. (2017) emphasize the results of expressing the “relevance” of the office hour to students; that is, communicating to students what the nature of a visit would entail and what results they could expect. In terms of the GUOH, its odd nature precludes a rationalization of its existence. In its description, students were told that they would be able to meet with multiple writing instructors simultaneously. In the case of Prof. Adachi, he was able to promote the fact that his fellow instructors had achieved higher levels of education than he. Dr. Cheng received a doctorate in Asian American Literature, while Dr. Harris specialized in Composition, and wrote the introduction to students in the campus-specific edition of The Everyday Writer. But all professors implementing this practice, could emphasize the value of being presented with multiple takes on the writing process, critical thinking, and even formatting. Furthermore, the students could be given the same rationale that had been given in creating the GUOH format in the first place, which is that it conveys the spirit of the university as a collaborative space with multiple academic relationships besides the teacher-student modality. 

Another consideration when implementing the GUOH is the membership within the small group of collaborating instructors. For us, we began with a group of three and our experience with that number was mostly positive. With a small group, it was not only easier to find a common time to hold the office hour, but provided an important consistency for our students. Moreover, the GUOH provided a formal environment which allowed for both students and instructors to learn from both the students and from our fellow instructors, however, we do not recommend that the GUOH be implemented as a new avenue of faculty evaluation. 

In our case, we had the luxury of having representatives of different experiences. Dr. Harris represented the composition-rhetoric training, Dr. Cheng had earned his Doctorate in a literary field, while Prof. Adachi had only earned his master’s degree in literature, but had taken numerous instructor training courses. However, our friendship precluded the GUOH, so it may have had a less hierarchical dynamic than implied. We do not recommend that the GUOH model be used as a new mode of employee supervision or training. 

As a final recommendation, now that many universities are returning to in-person instruction, the question arises of how the GUOH could be migrated to the in-person environment. Because the GUOH was designed specifically for an online environment, many of its key qualities and strengths do not translate outside of it and we do not recommend implementing these strategies in a face-to-face setting. The nature of the Zoom environment, perhaps incidentally, facilitated a certain posture towards the student work which, in the eyes of the authors, could not easily be replicated in a face-to-face environment.

Finally, further research should be taken to define the parameters of a successful implementation. In this paper, all of the evidence and interactions are anecdotal, put together after informal conversations. A more empirical study could look at a number of specific issues, including attendance rates, student satisfaction, efficacy in improving student writing, and even overall satisfaction with the class. In many ways, the Grand Unified Office Hour is a tentative first step in rethinking what a virtual online community can look like.

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