Asee peer logo

GIFTS: Meeting the students where they're at: a flipped model of office hours

Download Paper |

Conference

14th Annual First-Year Engineering Experience (FYEE) Conference

Location

University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tennessee

Publication Date

July 30, 2023

Start Date

July 30, 2023

End Date

August 1, 2023

Page Count

2

DOI

10.18260/1-2--44839

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/44839

Download Count

138

Paper Authors

biography

Kimberlyn Gray West Virginia University Institute of Technology

visit author page

Dr. Kimberlyn Gray is an Associate Professor at West Virginia University Institute of Technology in the department of Chemical Engineering. She coordinated STEM outreach for the Leonard C. Nelson College of Engineering and Sciences.

visit author page

author page

John T. Hird West Virginia University Institute of Technology Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-8491-4170

Download Paper |

Abstract

First-year students are often reluctant to visit office hours or seek out tutoring. Many first-year students will spend hours on an assignment without making progress when a quick answer from a professor would help them move forward. Because of this, the authors have experimented with holding office hours in student friendly locations at high traffic hours. The chosen location is a student common space with comfortable seating, areas with both large and small tables, private study rooms, computers, and a tutoring area. This allows us to make more efficient use of otherwise underutilized office hours, as well as allowing us to promote tutoring opportunities nearby. The goals of holding “public” office hours are to encourage students to approach professors with questions and to have regular study sessions during the office hours, even if they do not anticipate having questions.

In this paper, we discuss the strategies we have used over several years. The authors are from different departments and often share joint office hours. The office hours are promoted in both authors' classes. This year, we expanded public office hour times to include a wider variety of times of day and a greater number of days per week. We discuss strategies we used to attract students and the type of students who regularly utilized these times. Both authors regularly work with students from outside their own classes and refer these students to one-on-one tutoring. We discuss successes and failures of the strategy and what we plan to do differently in the future.

Gray, K., & Hird, J. T. (2023, July), GIFTS: Meeting the students where they're at: a flipped model of office hours Paper presented at 14th Annual First-Year Engineering Experience (FYEE) Conference, University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tennessee. 10.18260/1-2--44839

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2023 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015