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> I wonder how many times a student has taken time out of their day to trek across campus to the professor's office only to find the professor away, or head-dow

> I wonder how many times a student has taken time out of their day to trek across campus to the professor's office only to find the professor away, or head-down busy grading papers, or just about to leave? Typically, professors announce office hours during which they will be available to answer questions, so this is not an issue. From a professor's perspective, online options for tutoring students are vastly inferior. Helping a student understand a concept is interactive: you must ask the student questions, listen to their explanations, and formulate explanations to give back to them. That is very difficult in a text-based medium, particularly in a course involving mathematics or other things that don't really fit in plain text. (And while I can write LaTeX math quickly, my students cannot.) You'll also often have multiple students asking questions. In person, it's easy to group together related questions, and to jump from student to student -- or to say "why don't you talk to Sarah, she's working on the same problem." In an anonymous online setting, you lose that, and students can't connect to each other. I've used asynchronous online platforms like Piazza, and you lose all the opportunity to listen to students and figure out what exactly they're thinking. Instead you just provide a wall of text for them. And of course students learn to expect responses within hours at any time of day, including weekends, and start getting annoyed if you don't respond quickly to a question posted at 4am Saturday morning. You start to dread the Piazza notifications. Yes, you can set expectations and insist you only answer during certain hours, but other courses will have that one fanatical TA who answers at all hours, and so your students will still be annoyed. edit: That being said, you're right about students being more willing to use anonymous options. When I lectured online due to COVID, and students could send a direct message to me in the Zoom chat, I got loads of questions. I had to learn to keep the chat open on a second monitor to follow the questions and respond in real-time. As soon as we switched back to in-person teaching, the questions stopped, and the class would just stare at me blankly if I asked if they had questions. But I'm not sure how to replicate that option in person.

musingsole 4y ago
> Typically, professors announce office hours during which they will be available to answer questions, so this is not an issue. Saying something once or even a couple times that is at odds with the listener's inherent behavior doesn't count as communicating. Insisting it does sounds like the type of out of touch professors GP is talking about.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
johnnymorgan 4y ago
The zoom option turned teachers into streamers :) There is some meat in that concept and it's an interesting problem that doesn't have a solid solve yet. I love remote work,learning,etc but for that free flowing of data in a group or one on one setting it lacks positional audio. I can't whisper under my breath to the person beside me or break out with a small team and still have people near us hear the convo and maybe chime in. Tip: stream the class and give them the YT link so they can ask questions. Not ideal but should work and you might find a new process in there. Cheers
- bee_rider 4y ago
  It is too bad COVID couldn't have waited, like, 5-10 more years, we might have had VR zoom by then.
  - johnnymorgan 4y ago
    I don't see VR solving the issue per say, the tech is already there it's more a value prop issue, ie how to package it all together and make it work. Games like DayZ handle positional audio very well but a 3D engine is overkill when it's just audio that is missing. AR I think will fill this space over VR but time will tell. Imo a solid 2D layout with flexibility to 'move around' is all we need for UI. It's the audio rules that haven't really been mapped out outside of gaming I'm aware of
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      I was imagining a VW UI that basically allowed the instructor to walk around and "lean down" to indicate individual focus, but that might be unnecessarily skeuomorphic, maybe you could get 99% of the way there by just moving around a token like in roll20.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
> Typically, professors announce office hours during which they will be available to answer questions, so this is not an issue. True. Also true, students have other classes. To students raised in an async on demand world the concept of static office hours is fairly foreign. Certainly not top of mind.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  Office hours are a compromise. A professor can provide you with individualized help but in a timeboxed manner. One class is no more than something like 20% of a professor's time, either because they are spending most of their time on research or because they are teaching a huge pile of courses as an adjunct. Having professors sit on slack all day ready to respond to asynchronous questions from students is simply not an option.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    Isn’t the “a” the entire point of asynchronous communications? (That no one has to sit around all day to respond to them, as the medium is fundamentally async. If a few back-n-forths suggest that escalating to a synchronous medium is needed, that can still happen, but I’d bet well over 50% of initial contacts could be handled effectively totally async.)
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      Yes and no. My wife is a professor. In the experience of her colleagues, students who want slack/email feedback don't actually have the same definition of "asynchronous" that professors (or you) do. The number of emails received at 11pm regarding an assignment due as 12am is frankly outrageous. There is an expectation of extremely high availability when it comes to these kinds of interactions. So many professors create a blanket "come to my office hours" approach rather than trying to train students to understand that it might take them 24 hours (or longer - on weekends) to respond to an email.
sokoloff 4y ago
Perhaps pandering (at least excessively pandering) to people being only willing to use anonymous channels isn’t doing them any life-long favors. I have my own “don’t feel like dealing with this mildly unpleasant task” hang-ups. I’d likely be more successful and happier if I spent more time overcoming them (to include being forced to).
wink 4y ago
Your answer confuses me. Background: I studied in Europe, from 2003 to 2010. Yes, professors had office hours, but you'd usually go there if something was extraordinary, or maybe if you really couldn't find a tutor or someone else to answer your pressing question before the test. We did have tutors, with weekly sessions, those were good for 90% of the stuff. Also it was recent enough that you could indeed write emails and expect an answer (CompSci though) But that's not the point, your "jump from student to student" confuses me - was this in a lecture hall with multiple people and some sort of panel Q&A? Office hours for us was basically waiting in line in front of the professor's office and going in one by one, also for the most part there were so many people that you'd hardly be remembered as an individual, so your "go talk to Sarah" sounds really unrealistic to me. But overall I am not disagreeing with you or the author a lot, my main point would more be: if their lecture was being streamed/recorded I probably would not have missed a single lesson, if I was in the position of the students here.
- capnrefsmmat 4y ago
  I admit as many students as fit into my office, and talk to them together. For larger classes I have booked larger rooms so ten students can come at once. In those courses, often students will come to work on the homework, and ask questions as they arise, rather than coming with pre-chosen questions. Usually the students are talking to each other as much as they are talking to me. I would only admit one student at a time if I were giving individual feedback on a project, or answering questions about a take-home exam where collaboration is not allowed, or something like that.

musingsole 4y ago

> Typically, professors announce office hours during which they will be available to answer questions, so this is not an issue. Saying something once or even a couple times that is at odds with the listener's inherent behavior doesn't count as communicating. Insisting it does sounds like the type of out of touch professors GP is talking about.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

johnnymorgan 4y ago

The zoom option turned teachers into streamers :) There is some meat in that concept and it's an interesting problem that doesn't have a solid solve yet. I love remote work,learning,etc but for that free flowing of data in a group or one on one setting it lacks positional audio. I can't whisper under my breath to the person beside me or break out with a small team and still have people near us hear the convo and maybe chime in. Tip: stream the class and give them the YT link so they can ask questions. Not ideal but should work and you might find a new process in there. Cheers

bee_rider 4y ago
It is too bad COVID couldn't have waited, like, 5-10 more years, we might have had VR zoom by then.
- johnnymorgan 4y ago
  I don't see VR solving the issue per say, the tech is already there it's more a value prop issue, ie how to package it all together and make it work. Games like DayZ handle positional audio very well but a 3D engine is overkill when it's just audio that is missing. AR I think will fill this space over VR but time will tell. Imo a solid 2D layout with flexibility to 'move around' is all we need for UI. It's the audio rules that haven't really been mapped out outside of gaming I'm aware of
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    I was imagining a VW UI that basically allowed the instructor to walk around and "lean down" to indicate individual focus, but that might be unnecessarily skeuomorphic, maybe you could get 99% of the way there by just moving around a token like in roll20.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

> Typically, professors announce office hours during which they will be available to answer questions, so this is not an issue. True. Also true, students have other classes. To students raised in an async on demand world the concept of static office hours is fairly foreign. Certainly not top of mind.

UncleMeat 4y ago
Office hours are a compromise. A professor can provide you with individualized help but in a timeboxed manner. One class is no more than something like 20% of a professor's time, either because they are spending most of their time on research or because they are teaching a huge pile of courses as an adjunct. Having professors sit on slack all day ready to respond to asynchronous questions from students is simply not an option.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Isn’t the “a” the entire point of asynchronous communications? (That no one has to sit around all day to respond to them, as the medium is fundamentally async. If a few back-n-forths suggest that escalating to a synchronous medium is needed, that can still happen, but I’d bet well over 50% of initial contacts could be handled effectively totally async.)
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    Yes and no. My wife is a professor. In the experience of her colleagues, students who want slack/email feedback don't actually have the same definition of "asynchronous" that professors (or you) do. The number of emails received at 11pm regarding an assignment due as 12am is frankly outrageous. There is an expectation of extremely high availability when it comes to these kinds of interactions. So many professors create a blanket "come to my office hours" approach rather than trying to train students to understand that it might take them 24 hours (or longer - on weekends) to respond to an email.

sokoloff 4y ago

Perhaps pandering (at least excessively pandering) to people being only willing to use anonymous channels isn’t doing them any life-long favors. I have my own “don’t feel like dealing with this mildly unpleasant task” hang-ups. I’d likely be more successful and happier if I spent more time overcoming them (to include being forced to).

wink 4y ago

Your answer confuses me. Background: I studied in Europe, from 2003 to 2010. Yes, professors had office hours, but you'd usually go there if something was extraordinary, or maybe if you really couldn't find a tutor or someone else to answer your pressing question before the test. We did have tutors, with weekly sessions, those were good for 90% of the stuff. Also it was recent enough that you could indeed write emails and expect an answer (CompSci though) But that's not the point, your "jump from student to student" confuses me - was this in a lecture hall with multiple people and some sort of panel Q&A? Office hours for us was basically waiting in line in front of the professor's office and going in one by one, also for the most part there were so many people that you'd hardly be remembered as an individual, so your "go talk to Sarah" sounds really unrealistic to me. But overall I am not disagreeing with you or the author a lot, my main point would more be: if their lecture was being streamed/recorded I probably would not have missed a single lesson, if I was in the position of the students here.

capnrefsmmat 4y ago
I admit as many students as fit into my office, and talk to them together. For larger classes I have booked larger rooms so ten students can come at once. In those courses, often students will come to work on the homework, and ask questions as they arise, rather than coming with pre-chosen questions. Usually the students are talking to each other as much as they are talking to me. I would only admit one student at a time if I were giving individual feedback on a project, or answering questions about a take-home exam where collaboration is not allowed, or something like that.