OHQ: making office hours better
Office Hours Queue is a web application built by Dorothy Chang, Eric Chiu, and Suzanne Knop during PennApps 2016f. OHQ aims to make office hours a more efficient and data-driven process, and addresses many complaints about how office hours are run, in response to dissatisfaction from both students and TAs. Listed are below are some of OHQ's features and the problems they were made to solve.
Position in queue and estimated wait time: after a student submits a description of their issue to OHQ, they are provided with the number of people in front of them and the estimated amount of time they will have to wait. By making the process more transparent, OHQ allows students to use their time more efficiently: for example, if a student has to wait an hour, they can work on the next problem first.
Student information: TAs can see the list of students in the queue, the type of issue they're having (technical, conceptual, etc), and a short description of the specific problem. One common problem in office hours is students putting their names down before they have actual questions, in hopes that by the time the list gets to them, they will have a question. This prevents that by forcing students to describe their issue. In addition, if a TA sees that two students are having the same problem, he or she can help both of them at the same time, rather than explaining the same concept multiple times.
TA dashboard: TAs can also mark students as being helped or finished. When a TA first helps a student, marking the student as "being helped" lets other TAs know to go onto other students. When a student has been successfully helped, the "finish" button removes a student from the queue. If a TA cannot figure out a student's particular issue, they can mark them as "not being helped", and the student remains at the top of the queue for the next TA to help.
Student form validation: Once students are on the queue, they cannot put their name on the queue again until after they have been helped: this discourages students from signing up several times without specific questions. Note that the student form is easy to integrate with university web logins.
Metrics: Keeping track of how long students wait before they're helped, as well as common categories and problems, will be helpful long-term. For example, if students have to wait 2 hours on Wednesday nights but only 15 minutes on Friday afternoons, more TAs can be made available on Wednesday nights.
Planned functionality: Some categories of problems are easier to solve than others: a compiler error is probably much easier to resolve than five failing test cases. Giving priority to problems that require significantly less time to resolve, such as by putting three compiling problems before one conceptual one, will move the queue along more quickly.
Comments and questions can be directed to Dorothy (dorothyichang@gmail.com), Eric (echiu1997@gmail.com), or Suzanne (sknop8@gmail.com).
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