Make it Your Own! Increasing Educational Value Through Office Hour Activities

I believe letting my personality shine through the way I teach “humanizes” the online learning experience. One of the ways I have tried to do this is through my office hour sessions. I have developed some ways to inject a little more of my personality and enthusiasm for vertebrate life through additional activities the students can engage with at their discretion, including:

• Supplementary lectures exploring certain topics in the course in more detail, such as phylogenetic reconstruction methods
• Software tutorials such as Mendeley citation manager and using Google Scholar to locate and browse primary sources
• Livestreaming my research activities, such as preparing vertebrate natural history specimens, and talking with students about how they could perform similar activities at home with their dissection specimens
• Perhaps most importantly, guided pre-exam study sessions and post-exam review sessions.

    None of these activities are required of course – my goal is simply to increase the educational value of the course by bringing my own personality and expertise to bear. Before beginning and occasionally throughout, I make sure to clarify that I can stop at any time to walk through course concepts or answer assignment questions. For each activity, I use my cell phone or computer to record the Zoom session, sometimes mounting my phone camera on a table-clamping gooseneck mount to capture footage of a lab bench if I am performing an activity not using my computer. I also enable auto-transcription so the video can be viewed while muted or by students who need caption accommodations. Subsequent to the session, I upload the videos and transcripts as unlisted videos to YouTube, such as the one below, and post them to a dedicated “Supplementary Information” Module so that students who missed the session can go back and watch the videos later. Posting the videos to YouTube, such as the one below, also allows me to track view count so I can get a better sense of which materials students find the most useful. 

    A student had this to say about my approach to office hours: “[H]e utilizes office hours where students do not have questions to further enrich our educational experience by walking us through various applicable aspects of zoology outside of course material (such as preparing specimens, sharing natural history collections, etc). It's impossible to miss his passion for his work and the subject matter, which is definitely contagious. Prior to exams, his exam reviews during office hours have also much more comprehensive than any I have ever experienced.”

    

    I look forward to these office hour sessions because they are more relevant to me and my students than simply waiting for students to ask questions. Additionally, students are often prompted by what they are seeing to ask questions they otherwise wouldn’t, including things I don’t know the answer to! The experience has been fun and I hope to incorporate similar strategies into other courses I teach in the future.

Dakota M. Rowsey, Vertebrate Collections Manager, ASU Natural History Collections

I oversee the care and maintenance of ASU’s fish, reptile, amphibian, bird, and mammal specimens used in teaching and research, as well as their associated data. I am passionate about vertebrate biodiversity and seek to use my teaching to share this love as a means of empowering their own sense of biophilia and curiosity.