Conducting Remote Office Hours with your Students
prepared by Kunal Marwaha (marwahaha@berkeley.edu). Please email with suggestions or questions.
Revision: March 2, 2015
No warranty is expressed or implied by the author.

Here is a process to conduct virtual, video-call office hours with your students. This can be useful for adding more convenient times to connect with your students and answer questions.


Scheduling appointments with your students:
Visit www.doodle.com .
Click "Schedule an event".
Make a Title (suggestion: "Office Hour").
Add a Location & Description (suggestion (for now): "Online Video Hangout"; you can edit this later to include the link to the video-call).
Add your name and email address, and press "Next".
Select the days of this week's office hours, and press "Next".
Add the times of your office hours, and press "Next". Add further time slots if necessary.
Click on "Settings". Select boxes: "Participant can only choose one option", "Limit the number of participants per option". Make the number of participants "1". Press "Next".
Leave the Sharing settings alone, and press "Finish". Your signup webpage has been created.
Email this webpage to your students with a message.
(suggestion: "I am conducting virtual office hours. Please visit this website to schedule an appointment. <Paste link to webpage here>. Shortly before office hours, I will update the description to include the link to the video-call. At your appointment time, please go to the scheduling webpage, and click on the link to join the video-call."


Conducting Office Hours:
There are two good options: Google Hangouts for private 1-on-1 office hours, and Google Moderator/Hangouts on Air for public, recorded office hours. I recommend private office hours for the confidentiality and comfort of your students.

1) Private 1-on-1 Office Hours:
Visit plus.google.com .
If the right sidebar is not showing, click the quotation-mark button at the top right of the screen.
At the bottom right, press "Start a video hangout".
A dialog box will appear: Copy the "permanent link". Your students can join the video call by visiting this link.
At this time, you can edit the Doodle poll's description (use the Doodle admin link emailed to you) with this "permanent link" to the video call.
Use the Doodle admin link to see when your students have signed up for office hours. At the time of an appointment, your student can join the video call, and you can communicate via Google Hangouts.

2) Public, Recorded Office Hours:
This article details the best way to set up Google Hangouts on Air and Google Moderator: https://code.google.com/p/course-builder/wiki/OnlineOfficeHours


In-between office hours:
If possible, you (the instructor) should use the same "permanent link" to join the video call. If you press "Start a video hangout" at another time, a new "permanent link" will be created, and you must update the Doodle poll description accordingly (so your students can join your video-call).
If you schedule back-to-back office hours, one student may try to join the video call while you are finishing up with a previous student. If so, please ask the new student to leave the chat, and re-enter in a couple minutes.  Finish up quickly with the previous student.

Good luck!