If you’d like to host office hours remotely, you can use Microsoft Teams. Schedule time or meet instantly with an individual, a small group, or a whole Team.
Schedule Meeting
Open Office Hours
- In any Channel within your Class Team, click on the video camera icon at the top, right of the Posts tab and choose Schedule a Meeting.
- Enter a descriptive name in the Add title field. I would choose “<course code> Office Hours“.
- Click Add required attendees only if you’d like to invite attendees who are not already enrolled in the course or part of the Team.
- Select the date, start time, and end time.
- If you’d like the meeting to recur, expand the drop-down menu which currently shows Does not repeat, and choose the desired recurrence frequency. Weekly is the most common choice for office hours.
- If you’d like the option for students to attend in-person, click Add location and type in your Building and Office number.
Room not appearing on the list?
The Add location drop-down menu only shows public rooms available to anyone. To schedule time in your own office, you have to type it in.
- Type details for this new meeting into the text box of the same name, or just click Send.
- All students in your Team will receive an email invitation, and the meeting will appear on their calendars in both Teams and Outlook. A post with the meeting details will also appear within the Channel where it was created.
- At the appropriate time, join the meeting. Your students will be able to do the same.
1:1 or Small Group Office Hours
- Open your Teams Calendar, and click New meeting.
- Enter a descriptive name in the Add title field. I would choose “<course code> Office Hours with <name of group or individual>“.
- Click Add required attendees, and search for and then select their names as they appear in the drop-down menu one-at-a-time.
- Select the date, start time, and end time.
- If you’d like the meeting to recur, expand the drop-down menu which currently shows Does not repeat, and choose the desired recurrence frequency.
- If you’d like the option for students to attend in-person, click Add location and type in your Building and Office number.
Room not appearing on the list?
The Add location drop-down menu only shows public rooms available to anyone. To schedule time in your own office, you have to type it in.
- Type details for this new meeting into the text box of the same name, or just click Send.
- All invited attendees will receive an email invitation to the meeting, and it will appear on their calendars in both Teams and Outlook
- At the appropriate time, join the meeting. The invitees will be able do the same.
Meet Instantly
Instant Office Hours
- Select the Chat tab () and click the New Chat button ().
- Enter the name(s) of the person/people with whom you wish to meet in the “To:” field, selecting them as they appear in the drop-down menu.
- Once all the names have been entered, click into the “Type a message” field at the bottom of the window (this step is necessary to make the meeting options button appear).
- Click the down-caret () to expand the More meet now options menu, and select Video call. If you click the phone icon instead of the chevron, it will start an Audio call.
Phone icon missing?When you add more than one participant to a chat, the phone icon changes to a sound wave icon, but the functionality remains the same.