Office hours vs. review sessions: the power of a name and a little prep

My campus requires all faculty members to hold four office hours a week.  During these office hours I'm required to be in my office (or some other location), available to any student who wants to come by.

The idea is a great one: there are many reasons why students might want to come and see instructors outside of class, and office hours give all students an opportunity to do just that.  So, in my dream world, I would sit in my cozy office chair sipping tea while student after student came into my office asking thoughtful questions about biology and my advice on transfer possibilities (and bringing me artisan cheese to sample).

But in reality, office hours quickly turn into just another hour to get work done.  Students almost never came by, and when they did it was usually for a few questions that were quickly answered before the student went on their way.  Oh, sure, anytime there was a major assignment due a handful of students would come by to ask about it, but that was at most four or five students every few weeks (I tend to have about 70 to 100 students a semester in my courses).

The lack of student attendance was frustrating, because I knew they could use help (shockingly, they don't all score 100% on my exams, despite my amazing in-class instructing), and I also knew that they wanted help, as there was always a constant chant of "Can you hold a review session?" whenever an exam came up.  I often would hold a specially scheduled review session, while in the back of my mind thinking, "Wasn't that what office hours should have been for?".

And then last year it clicked.  Students desperately want to go to review sessions, but most couldn't care less about office hours.  A quick e-mail to my dean confirmed that there is no requirement to actually call office hours "office hours", and an idea was born: I no longer hold four office hours a week; instead I hold four hours worth of review sessions each week.

I hold the review sessions in the lab I teach my courses in, scatter the hours through the week (to minimize scheduling conflicts), and publish the hours on my syllabus.  I also don't just sit there and wait for student questions; each week I come with prepared slides that list what I can go over that day (e.g., what I think are tough topics), a few new things to talk about (e.g., a preview of material to come, or another example of something we've talked about), and a set of test-like questions from the prior weeks' content aimed at promoting discussion of core topics.  I then ask the students what they want to do, and we go from there.

The weekly review sessions have been a huge hit.  For the primary class I teach (majors' biology), I had four students attend during the first week of the semester (I've never had students come to office hours during the first week to ask about anything other than enrollment issues), in the third week I had seven students attend (even though I had cancelled both review sessions due to being off campus, and only announced that I would be holding one an hour before it was scheduled to start), and last week I had 14 students show up.  This week I haven't even held all the review sessions yet, and I've already had 13 students show up.

In the first four weeks of the semester I had more students come to my review sessions than I typically have come to my office hours in an entire semester.  The students are active and engaged; most stay for the entire time asking me questions and working on my sample questions.  I'm also getting lots of positive feedback ("These are really helping, Prof. Radagast").  And, as an added bonus, since I hold the review sessions in the lab room, students know that they can use the review sessions to give themselves extra time to look at lab specimens, if they need it.

One challenge to this concept is that the review sessions must be specialized for each class.  So, I had to split up my office hours to target each class I teach (luckily I only teach two separate courses), and I've made it clear that I'm happy to schedule office appointments for anyone who can't make the review sessions for their class.  It's not ideal, but the extra attendance and engagement by the students make it worth it.

I think there are three interacting factors that contribute to the success of the review sessions:

• The name - Students think about "office hours" in a completely different light than they do "review sessions".
• The location - Instead of walking into my office and interrupting me while I'm doing some probably meaningless, but important-looking task, students instead walk into a room designed for teaching, and see me sitting at the front doing nothing but waiting for them to arrive¹.  
• The preparation - While students end up asking me lots of questions, at the start of each session I usually just get blank stares. Having a few slides prepared with sample test questions, extra content, and a list of what I think is tough helps break the ice and get the session going.  The sample exam questions are especially liked, and much of our time has been spent going over them.

As an added bonus, I'm enjoying the time much more.  Instead of guiltily doing administrivia during office hours, I'm now interacting with my students and helping them learn the content.  Which is, after all, why I'm here.


¹ Or, more likely, they're waiting at the lab door and see me rushing from my office to the lab 15 seconds before the review session is scheduled to start.

It is done.

I'm pleased to report that the semester is finally over. I finished my grades last night, and this afternoon I finished off all the fiddly end-of-semester work that I'd been putting off. My e-mail has an away message, my voice mail won't be checked for weeks, and I have nothing I need to do for work until January. Ahhhhhh.

How did I celebrate? By coming home and taking a nap.

Stay on target ...

The end of the semester has proven to be insanely busy. Even though many instructors at my college have already turned in their grades, I still have dozens of papers to grade and haven't even given my last final exam yet. This is even though my SO has been querying me for my name when I arrive home, thanks to me working solid 10 or 12 hour days for at least the last two weeks (including weekends).

Making things even more "fun" is that I've had the "pleasure" of turning in more than a dozen different students for plagiarizing this semester, most of them in the past week and a half. I've even set a new personal record for the greatest fraction of plagiarizers in a course: 50% of the completing class.

More to come once grades are in.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Yes, I am indeed still alive. My prior post on the topic of why I haven't been posting still applies: my new online course is keeping me insanely busy, and whatever spare time I have is being spent either sleeping, playing the guitar, or shopping for a new classical guitar. The only change I'd make to my prior post is to eliminate the "not stressed" part: I've fallen weeks behind on grading large assignments, and have barely been getting my online course's units created on time.

The online course is still going well; I'm learning a lot, and I think the students are learning at least a little something. Right now my completion rate looks like it's going to be around 2/3 of the initially enrolled students, which I consider to be pretty good for my first try (we've reportedly had online courses with completion rates of <25% at my campus). I'm already looking forward to teaching the course again in the spring. I'm also looking forward to winter break, when I'll have time to start writing more here.

I hope you have a relaxing, food-filled Thanksgiving!

Busy, yet not stressed

As regular readers can probably guess by my posting frequency, I've been busy lately. As I predicted at the start of the semester, my new online course has been consuming any time it can get its hands on: I'm easily spending at least 15-20 hours each week developing the content for it, and at least as much time in the course interacting with the students and grading their work. Add that to my regular in-person lecture and lab classes, and I'm one busy grasshopper.

I'm enjoying the new course tremendously, and even though I've been extremely busy, I haven't been overly stressed. The course is thankfully small, which means that I have enough time to get to know the students, and I can assign regular written assignments and give the students copious feedback on those. Creating material for the new course is a ton of fun; writing the material is much like blogging (all I'm doing is writing general summaries of basic biological content for a non-scientist audience), and finding artwork has been an enjoyable challenge (I'm attempting to build the course entirely from open-licensed artwork). I'm already looking forward to having time in future semesters to revise what I've created.

The biggest complaint I've gotten from students so far is that the course is too much work and that the exams are too hard. Since this is likely one of the first college-level science courses these students have taken, and these students have surely been exposed to the "online courses are easy" myth, this isn't surprising. It's hard to explain nicely that yes, this course is in fact challenging, and that no, I'm not going to make the tests easier.

Outside of work I'm not doing a whole lot other than taking another guitar class¹. This class requires far less time than my summer course (thankfully), but it's been an enjoyable distraction, and has helped motivate me to keep playing. It's hard to believe that six months ago I didn't even have a guitar, but now I can (slowly) play a growing number of tunes (the most complex of which are probably Dust in the Wind and Vals by Calatuyud).

¹ And attending a super-cool Genesis concert at the Hollywood Bowl. It was such a good concert that I didn't mind getting rained on for half of the concert, that they ended the concert a few songs early due to the rain (though I sorely missed hearing Carpet Crawlers), or that we got stuck in (non-concert) traffic on the freeway at 1:30am.

Another semester begins!

Another semester has started at Rhosgobel U. This summer was filled with fun visitors, an amazingly productive garden (we've been harvesting pounds of fresh tomatoes, peppers, and beans every week for the past month), and lots of rest and relaxation. This was a contrast to the past few summers (when I've done field work out of the country during the summers), and thus I'm feeling much more rested and relaxed than in recent years.

Regular readers will note that I've been silent for a while; I apologize for this, and should explain it. The primary culprit, as one would expect, is that other avenues have started taking up my time. First on the list is that this semester I'm creating a new online course from scratch. While I'm enjoying this (I've been planning something like this for years), it also means that all of my writing time is now dedicated to the course.

Additionally, I've found that I really enjoy playing the guitar. My summer course was a blast, and thanks to it I've improved a lot (though I'm still a complete novice). The course took a tremendous amount of time (at least 15 hours a week combined in class and practicing), and I'm still practicing for an average of half an hour a day. I'm finding that when I've got some spare time, I don't sit down at the computer (or, rather, I don't continue sitting at the computer), but instead wander over and pick up the guitar. Right now I'm focusing on classical guitar, and might even be buying a new classical guitar soon ( since I “need” a classical guitar to play classical music).

But never fear, kind reader, I'm not going to tell you I'm quitting writing. I've enjoyed this for too long to do that. Instead, I'll be reducing my frequency of posting; so, I'd expect something about weekly, though I give no guarantees.

That said, here's looking forward to an exciting semester filled with new things.

Teaching link: Wellcome Images

One of the problems of developing an online course (or an in-person course, for that matter) is finding good artwork. Sure, there are lots of images available on the web, but relatively few of these are completely legal to use (i.e., most are copyrighted works with no clear license to allow educators to use them). However, works licensed under Creative Commons licenses are freely usable by educators¹, and thus I now attempt to use only Creative Commons licensed works when I develop teaching materials.

There are many places where you can find Creative Commons licensed materials (e.g., Flickr's advanced search lets you filter by license, and all PLOS journal articles are Creative Commons licensed), but BoingBoing just linked to an amazing resource: Wellcome Images. This website, run by the Wellcome Trust, contains images depicting "two thousand years of human culture," and everything on it has been released under a Creative Commons license².

Wellcome Images is one of the world's richest and most unique collections, with themes ranging from medical and social history to contemporary healthcare and biomedical science.

All our images are available on demand in digital form. Search online or use the expertise of our professional scientific and historical researchers.

Whether it's medicine or magic, the sacred or the profane, science or satire - you'll find more than you expect.

This unrivalled collection contains historical images from the Wellcome Library collections, Tibetan Buddhist paintings, ancient Sanskrit manuscripts written on palm leaves, beautifully illuminated Persian books and much more.

The Biomedical Collection holds over 40 000 high-quality images from the clinical and biomedical sciences. Selected from the UK's leading teaching hospitals and research institutions, it covers disease, surgery, general healthcare, sciences from genetics to neuroscience including the full range of imaging techniques. (quote from here)

I've only been browsing for a short while, but have already found a ton of images I think I'll use in my course. Who wouldn't want pictures of a malaria parasite in a mosquito's gut, an opium poppy, a human embryo implanting at 6 days, a picture of male bodybuilders pre-testosterone-injections, or drawings of morels? Go find some for yourself!

¹ As long as the educators are creating non-commercial works, and even then some Creative Commons licenses allow commercial works.
² All images are either under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-commercial Licence 2.0 or a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives 2.0 license.

It is done!

My grades are all officially turned in, and thus the semester is finally over. This was easily one of the busiest (and worst) semesters that I've had to date (see here, here, and here for a glimpse why), and thus I'm ecstatic that it's over. It seems appropriate that I "celebrated" by falling asleep on the couch immediately after dinner last night. I'm so exciting.

While we don't have any major travel plans set yet (though a possible trip is in the works), my SO and I are both looking forward to spending time on our house. Our long-stalled bathroom and kitchen remodeling is first up on our list, though we have a number of other household projects we want to get through as well¹. I'll also be taking a guitar course, and will finally have time to start blogging more regularly (heck, just posting all the drafts I wrote up during the semester will be a big project).

Ahhhh, summer.

¹ So, any visitors to the Rhosgobel estate this summer are thus forewarned that they will be staying at a house under construction (and that construction work may be occuring during their visit).

Not quite there yet

Those familiar with my schedule know that my semester ended last week. However, even though I got to dress up in snazzy robes and look all official in the graduation ceremony, I'm still not done yet. I've got a huge stack of papers to grade, some letters of recommendation to write, and a few plagiarism reports to file¹.

I won't let all that stop me from enjoying the weekend though; I can finally taste the sweet elixir of summer.

¹ Will my students ever learn that I don't want to catch them plagiarizing? It means I have to spend at least 2-3 hours per case documenting the plagiarism, confronting them, and then writing a formal report to our dean. It'd save everyone a lot of time if they just cited sources properly; heck, I might even be done with grading if it wasn't for the plagiarism cases I'm currently dealing with.

A sign of the moral decay of America's youth

Yesterday I gave an exam to my majors biology course, on which I had a (I thought) relatively simple question asking students to design an experiment to test whether a certain species of animals was monogamous or not.

More than ten students called me over during the exam to ask what the word monogamous meant.

Wouldn't the conservative pundits have a field day?

Yes, I'm still here.

Sadly, unlike PZ, I've still got three more weeks of classes to go, and they're going to be crazy. I'm miles behind on grading, am leading a committee that will be actively working through the end of the semester, and am being asked to give multiple presentations to campus groups in the next few weeks. Not helping anything is the fact that the past three weekends have all had at least one day (and one weekend had two) taken up with on-campus work or field trips.

I'm exhausted; the next three weeks can't go by fast enough.

Sometimes being a biologist is just cool

Every semester I rear my lab tech rears dozens of Manduca sexta caterpillars to use in an experiment for one of my classes. The caterpillars aren't harmed during the experiment, and thus they're also a great demonstration of insect life cycles: I buy them as eggs, and then show the students what they look like throughout their life cycle (much like this series of posts I made a while back).

Well, today was pupa display day, and as I was transferring the pupae to a larger cage I noticed that one of them felt different. A few seconds later I noticed that it had a little crack in it. Less than five minutes later I had an adult moth running around on my hands¹.

Even though I've reared these guys for years, this is the first time I've actually watched a moth emerge from its pupal case. The cute little fella did end up excreting all over my hands², but the whole thing was just far too cool to let a little uric acid get in the way of the fun.

I didn't have a camera handy, sadly, so there won't be any pictures.

¹ Note that I'm using the verb "run"; as soon as the moth was out of the pupal case it was able to walk extremely quickly. In fact, the moth wasn't just walking randomly, it was trying to walk as high up as it could; it was probably trying to find a nice high branch to cling to while its wings expanded.
² And shirt. The moths save up all the nitrogenous waste they produce while they're pupae, and then excrete it all shortly after eclosing.

Where have I been?

Unfortunately this semester's heavy workload (I'm in the classroom 7 hours a week more than I was last semester, and am chair of a committee that has a large project to complete by June) is keeping me extremely busy. Many work days recently have been in excess of 12 hours, and it doesn't look like that's going to get better anytime soon. So, while I'm going to try to keep posting regularly, I'd expect quiet periods to occur sporadically from now until the end of the semester (which is about seven weeks away). Sorry.

On a separate note, I've been asked how things are going with my new guitar. Sadly, things aren't going. I ordered a guitar and two hard cases¹ from Musician's Friend two weeks ago, and everything did indeed arrive last week. However, the two cases (one of which had the guitar in it) were shipped in the same box, with no padding to protect them from either the other items in the box or the elephants in the UPS facilities. So, long story short, virtually everything in the shipment was damaged, and thus my guitar is now on its way back to the Musician's Friend warehouse. A new one will hopefully be arriving (with better packaging) in a few weeks.

¹ No, I don't need two cases; one was for a friend.

iNag

Regular readers will know that I've been a long-time user of But She's A Girl's Tracks program to manage my to-do lists. While I love Tracks, I must now admit to having found a better program, written by none other than Semantic Compositions: iNag. SC is only releasing news of the product today, but I've been lucky enough to have seen a trial version.

While iNag is ostensibly a contact and calendar-management program, its intuitive interface, elegant use of language (it's written by a linguist, after all), and customizable reminders make it the perfect to-do list manager. For instance, my committee meetings now use the nagging-department-chair theme ("Radagast, you're the best one for the job; we need you on this one," followed by "But Radagast, we need someone to go," and finishing with, "But English will steal all of our funding if you don't go, and it's coming out of your lab budget!") and my letters-of-recommendation automatically use the "nagging student" theme for reminders (hourly popups saying "Mr. Radagast, I know I only just gave you the form, and you told me it'd take two weeks, but do you have my letter done yet?"). It's a pleasure to use, and since it's written all in Java, it's entirely cross-platform.

So, head over to SC's page and read all about it!

[Update: Take a look at the date of the post. But She's a Girl should never have worried; Tracks is still near and dear to my heart.]

Teaching link: James Randi videos

James Randi is a debunker extraordinaire and host to the million-dollar challenge, a challenge where any psychic who can convincingly demonstrate that they have supernatural powers will win a million dollars. BoingBoing just linked to an 18-minute video wherein James Randi embarasses James Hydrick, a psychic who claimed to be able to move objects with his mind.



Of course I couldn't stop at just one James Randi video, so I ended up pestering my SO with an hour or two of James Randi videos from YouTube. The videos had excellent footage of psychics in action, and while most of the psychics simply gave up or refused to be tested when confronted, I got to thinking that these would still be a good vehicle for starting discussions of skepticism and pseudoscience in the classroom. Thus, I thought I'd post a few of the videos here as the most recent installment of my teaching link series.

James Randi's classic experiment in horoscopes:



James Randi discussing Uri Geller and Peter Popoff:



James Randi performing psychic surgery (caution: filled with fake blood):



James Randi demonstrating spoon bending and discussing the preliminary test a psychic healer will undergo to earn the million-dollar prize:



James Randi discussing Doris Collins, a cold reader:



James Randi explaining homeopathy (contains no footage of psychics, but is a great lecture on the ridiculosity of homeopathy):

Busy busy

While going to Innovations was fun, my pile of grading (and other tasks to do) did nothing but grow while I was away. So, this week has been spent playing catch up, and next week will likely be the same, meaning that I won't have much time for posting. Sorry.

That said, I will post some pictures of New Orleans soon. In fact, coming up next will be some pictures of food I had there. Enjoy!

Back in town

I'm back!

For those wondering if there was a repeat of this lovely experience, I'm pleased to say that there was not. In fact, I was so tired that I slept through the second landing of the day.

Sadly, today's going to be filled with catching up on all the work that I didn't do while I was in New Orleans (my pile of papers to grade is now very well traveled); I'll try to get some pictures and posts up later today or tomorrow.

In fact, if all goes well, I'll have a post up for Blog Against Sexism Day based around one of the worst talks I've heard in the past few years.

[Update: The post on the worst talk will have to wait for a bit, but I'm working on it.]

Good morning New Orleans!

I got this view from my room upon waking up this morning:




This is, I believe, the first time I've seen the Mississippi river.

Of course, I won't be seeing too much more of it (or the rest of New Orleans) today, as I'll be attending presentations all day long. On the schedule for the day is a talk on the Applied Math and Science Education Repository, a talk on promoting active learning in online environments, a talk on assessment techniques facutly can use in their courses, and many more. I'm looking forward to it!

New Orleans here I come!

This weekend I take off for New Orleans to attend the League for Innovations in the Community College's annual Innovations meeting. I've had a blast at the two Innovations meetings I've been to before, and I'm looking forward to this one.

Innovations is a neat meeting for people involved with community colleges for a few reasons:

• The meeting focuses exclusively on community college education; there are no K-12 talks, no 4-year universities talking about upper division courses, etc. Since many education meetings focus on K-12 education, this is very refreshing.
  
• While the meeting has tons of talks on pedagogy, it also features talks by (and for) administrators hoping to run their colleges more effectively. Last year there was a great talk by a state senator on how colleges should interact with their legislators, and another by a researcher studying the role of department chairs at various community colleges.
  
• Each talk is 45 minutes long, which gives the speaker enough time to use the pedagogical technique they're talking about (e.g., using groupwork), or at least enough time to delve into the details of their work.

I'm hoping to blog some of the more interesting talks from the conference (as I did last year), but I may be a bit hindered in that as I'm rooming with a colleague who doesn't know that I blog.

Filing Papers

As long-term readers will know, for the past few years I’ve been involved in a faculty-driven attempt to start a field research program at my campus. At the start of this academic year we were told that the program might be shut down due to the possible sale of our field site, and we’ve spent the last few months fighting to prevent that.

We lost the fight.

Of course there’s currently lots of spin that we didn’t actually lose, and lots of talk about how excited everyone still is about field experiences, but that doesn’t change the fact that our current program is being shut down¹.

This morning I’m spending some time cleaning up my office, and I keep coming across papers related to the program. Even though they’re just generic paperwork (budgets, plans for future courses, lists of past courses, summaries of research findings, etc.), they’re filled with hope and excitement. They represent hundreds (and probably thousands) of hours of work by many people in just the past few months, most of which was spent trying to document our successes and justify the program. Now they represent dead weight that needs to be moved out of my current-documents pile and into an archived folder. Who knew that sorting papers could be so depressing?

¹ This decision also makes most of the research that I (and my students) have been doing for the past few years meaningless.