Teams meetings are designed to facilitate ongoing conversation both synchronously and asynchronously. This offers many opportunities for engaging students, but it also means that the way you run virtual office hours may need to change in order to protect the privacy of your students. In this blog post we will look at a couple of options for how you can approach virtual office hours and ensure you are protecting student privacy.
Use the Microsoft Booking App
If you’ve ever booked an appointment or made a reservation at a restaurant online, you’ve interacted with a platform similar to Microsoft Bookings. Bookings allows you to create meeting types that are open for others to book on times and days you specify. The app connects to your Outlook calendar so that it only ever offers time slots where you do not have another appointment and then automatically created both an appointment in your Outlook calendar and a Teams meeting link for the meeting.
For office hours, booking allows students to schedule a time to meet with you during your office hours and gives them a unique meeting link so that their meeting can be completely confidential. You can also use Bookings to allow students to book in person meetings so there’s a single place that all your students can go if they want to book a meeting with you.
This video offers a good overview of setting up the bookings app to allow people to book meetings with you.
Additional Resources
Use a Recurring Meeting
If you don’t want to use appointment to manage office hours, you can use a recurring meeting to allow students to drop in to your virtual office. However, because anyone who joins the meeting will be able to see the full chat and shared file history for that meeting, you will need to take precautions to ensure student privacy.
- Turn off chat for the recurring meeting
- Use Breakout rooms if you need to exchange files or use the chat tool
- Delete used breakout room once the one on one talk with the student is complete
These measures will minimize the amount of information about their peers students can see in the recurring meeting. You may also want to configure your meeting to either keep students waiting in the lobby until you are ready to meet them.
Use Meet Now
If you use Teams with your class and know that students are generally comfortable with the platform, you can invite students to send you a chat message in Teams during your office hours to request a meeting. You can then use Meet Now to start a meeting within that private chat. Any chat messages or files shared during that meeting will be saved as part of the private chat with that student.
This is a good option for protecting student privacy. However, it does require that students be comfortable with beginning a private message with you, which could be a barrier for students who are shy, anxious, or have low comfort with technology. For these students, being able to book an appointment and then follow the link they are emailed may be easier.
Communicate Expectations
Chat messages in Teams can be a convenient and accessible way for students to contact you. Therefore, it is important to communicate your boundaries and expectations for how and when Teams chat can be used to contact you. Some things to consider include:
- Whether you want to receive text messages outside of Office Hours.
- Predicted response time to a chat message received outside Office Hours.
- How you will (or will not) respond to a message outside of Office Hours.
- Time of the day when you will be reading chat messages.
You can also set a custom status message that people will see when you they initiate a chat with you. This is another way you can communicate your expectations.
Have Questions?
If you have questions or would like to talk about ways to make your office hours more effective for your students, we would be very happy to meet with you. CIEL offers one on one consultations on pedagogical topics and around our learning technologies. To request a consultation you can fill out this web form or send an email to learnsupport@viu.ca. When emailing, we suggest including at least two days and times that will work for your schedule.
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