Hold office hours with Teams
Start with Create a Team if you want to create a Teams space for your course.
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.
Contents
Visit your course's Teams space
Steps to locating your course's Teams space are available at Where is Teams?
Create a new channel
After opening your course's Teams space, create a new channel by
- clicking the ellipsis icon; then
- clicking Add channel
Add details of your course's office hours
The Channel name should display office hours clearly so that students understand when timing for making contact is appropriate. Click Add.
Your new office hours channel is prepared
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.
Connect with students with video or audio-only chat
Click upon the icon of a student that has indicated interest in meeting for your office hour.
Within the menu which appears, initiate a video or audio call with the following steps:
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
