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# System prepended metadata

title: Office Hours

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# Office Hours

## Summary of prior discussion

- Generally a good idea to make extra revision help available
- Have to be careful not to rely on students realising they need help/putting themselves out there and asking for it
  - Maybe we should be reaching out directly if we see someone struggling

## Questions to answer

- When should we have office hours?
  - Can't disrupt workshops
  - Shouldn't ask mentors/students to commit to after-hours work
  - Leaves only project times (probably Thursdays)
- If we do Thursdays do we ask them to come in pairs?
  - Otherwise it kind of disrupts their project group
  - However that will bias the office hour to project problems
  - Some people will be uncomfortable asking for personal help with another there

## Scheduled cohort sessions

Jack suggested scheduling a one hour session each week. The cohort would vote on what topic to revise, and a mentor can prepare some material. E.g. Oli going over git stuff.

- Is this a good idea?
- Would it replace office hours or be an extra?


## Buddy system
Each cohortee is paired wih an alumni
- Probably previous cohort (doesn't need knowledge, just availability and interest)
- Previous cohort also have just done curriculum and can share how they learned to learn



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## Minutes

- People are entirely allowed to revise in evenings, distinct from PRs on group project at 3am
- Concern is with potential mentors' time. Although alumni might prefer evenings
- Are we going ahead with office-hours? Some people might have evening commitments
- No harm in doing more than one of these options
- We should be making space for extra learning
- We need to make sure this is open to everyone who wants it, not compulsory for everyone
- what is the distinction between revision circles fac overflow and office hours?
  - maybe shouldn't be interfering with revision circles
- Potentially Tuesday evenings to capture the workshop content
    - To book a 15 minute presentation you have to submit a relevant question
    - We could record for cohort to learn from - probably not helpful
    - Great feedback for workshops

- CF to keep on top of learning opportunities that would apply for everyone, which Oli could organise a codealong for in the following week

- CF to write up buddy system for FAC21 

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### Slack thoughts on office hours


**Oli**
I'm wondering whether Office Hours during course time is actually a good idea, even on a Thursday


Don't know if we should be encouraging people to leave their groups to go do personal learning

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**Gregor  11:06 AM**
I was thinking about this too. My hunch is that office hours should be outside of course hours

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**Oliver  11:12 AM**
Yeah, which has its own different set of problems. Asking staff/mentors to do unpaid labour for the course after hours, and asking students to commit to more learning after (sometimes exhausting) 8 hour days
:+1:

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**Gregor  11:25 AM**
I guess an alternative is to take an hour in the week for office hours and everyone is asked not to work on projects during that time? Would it make sense for office hours to be compulsory? Would they then miss the mark of supporting those who are having a tougher time on the course?

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**Jack  11:26 AM**
It makes our message even trickier around not having to study outside of course hours. I haven't got the feeling from any of my 121s yet that anyone is struggling to a worrying degree. If we did want to do targeted mentoring, I genuinely don't know who we would invite to it, and if it isn't targeted, the most likely people to sign up will be the people who 'need it least'.

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**Oliver  11:28 AM**
If we were going to keep them on Thursday afternoon we could ask them to book slots as a pair, but then it's limited to talking about project-related topics

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**Oliver  11:41 AM**
Yeah I agree with all of that. I think something that existed for our cohort that I haven't seen happen since we moved to Finsbury Park is ad hoc explanations by random alumni

At least once a week someone from FAC7 or 8 would be downstairs at Palmers Road drawing a git diagram on the whiteboard or talking about callbacks or something

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**Oliver  11:48 AM**
we could formalise a one hour "alumni going over a topic chosen by the cohort" slot each week, then book people for it like speakers

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**Jack  12:10 PM**
I'm just not a fan of the office-hours channel so, given we've agreed to it, I don't know if my opinion is that relevant. But here it is anyway :grimacing:

"Struggle" is such a hard / subjective metric to define.

E.g. last week Jihyun and Jennifer felt like they were struggling more than Azizi and Amber who 'got it', but they didn't get it, they just approach not understanding things differently - "let's make decisions and try stuff out until it works" rather than "let's read through the workshop again to make sure we understand it". They were all struggling with the content equally but their response to that struggle manifested differently.

I think one to one tuition is awesome but resource-heavy and inherently biased towards people who ask for it *or* people we assume are struggling 'more' from our perspective.

If anything it would perhaps be better to have a cohort vote every week on a particular area everyone wants covered again, that Oli does an hour's code along on, i.e. like the Git workflow which everyone loved. But this isn't very sustainable either (Oli has a job and can't do this forever, and has better things to do on weekends than prepare ad hoc tutorials).

Someone has suggested that as well as weekly curriculum mentors, everyone is assigned a personal mentor from the previous cohort that they can contact throughout the first half, who is responsible for going back to them when possible, perhaps setting up an evening or weekend call, to go through any course material together. This feels like a good compromise of everything we're trying to do.

**Gregor**
I think your point about different manifestations of 'struggle' may be the key here. Those who generally feel confident about coding are probably more likely to feel comfortable with not knowing and going with the 'break stuff' approach. Those who feel less confident often introspect and blame themselves for 'not knowing' and be careful to find the 'right' approach to tackling a problem.

Perhaps, what we're trying to address is individual's responses to not knowing and our solution is to increase people's confidence in their ability to solve problems.
I'm not sure I have a clear solution though so sorry if this is unhelpful.

**Jack**
For me, that's exactly right, and  well put. I think by creating even more spaces for people to seek help is fine / might be a but much, but what is more important is that from the beginning everyone understands that naturally some people will want to learn by trying and failing, others will want to be confident before they do so, and everyone should be encouraging and supporting each other to learn.
In that example, Azizi should be more conscious of the impact his approach has on more cautious learners, and Jennifer should have more confidence that everyone's in the same boat. Neither of these softer objectives are addressed by office-hours.