Office Hour Scheduling via Google Calendar

Activity

Guidance and help

Office Hour Scheduling via Google Calendar

Fikry Boutros

Particularly helpful to facilitate the scheduling of office hours with students for teachers who need to meet students individually in short timeslots.

Tech needed: Shared online space

Asynchronous

Accessibility: No accessibility issues

Duration: < 5 mins

Student preparation: None

Educator preparation: None

ACTIVITY PURPOSE

To facilitate the scheduling of office hours with students.

USEFUL FOR

Particularly helpful to facilitate the scheduling of office hours with students for teachers who need to meet students individually in short timeslots.

PREPARATION

Set up the appointment slots on your calendar and share link and etiquette with students.

INSTRUCTIONS

For Google calendar users,

Create a new calendar and call it “Office hours for COURSENAME-SEMESTER”
Create a new item on it – not an “Event” but “appointment slot”
Save and share the link that appears there with students
Inform students of the etiquette for booking and cancelling appointments.

Fikry Boutros demonstrates this in the video, and gives his students the following etiquette (extracted from his general Zoom etiquette):

Please upload a picture of you on your Zoom account. It will help your instructor recognise you faster and better; a face with a name helps.
If you don’t wish to open the camera during class, please do so in your one-on-one conference with your instructor. It’s important for your instructor to see you and to know who you are.
When you join the Zoom room for a meeting or conference, you may find yourself in the ‘waiting room’. Please be patient until the instructor is done with his previous meeting and lets you in.
If you book an appointment (e.g. for an Office Hour meeting or a conference), please be sure to show up on or before the time. This reflects professionalism and good class decorum.
Should you cancel an appointment for any reason, send a message to your instructor, apologising and explaining. You can do so through the calendar itself, which will free up the slot for other students to book.

DURATION

5 minutes.

ADAPTATIONS AND EXAMPLES

You can place the Zoom link (or whatever place you want students to meet you) in the “description” or “location” of the slots – otherwise, you can use the automatically created Google Meet link that Google calendar creates when someone books an appointment.