14th Annual First-Year Engineering Experience (FYEE) Conference
University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tennessee
July 30, 2023
July 30, 2023
August 1, 2023
2
10.18260/1-2--44839
https://peer.asee.org/44839
138
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.
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
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