Hacker News Reader

> I wonder how many times a student has taken time out of their day to trek across campus to the professor's office only to find the professor away, or head-down busy grading papers, or just about to leave?

Typically, professors announce office hours during which they will be available to answer questions, so this is not an issue.

From a professor's perspective, online options for tutoring students are vastly inferior. Helping a student understand a concept is interactive: you must ask the student questions, listen to their explanations, and formulate explanations to give back to them. That is very difficult in a text-based medium, particularly in a course involving mathematics or other things that don't really fit in plain text. (And while I can write LaTeX math quickly, my students cannot.)

You'll also often have multiple students asking questions. In person, it's easy to group together related questions, and to jump from student to student -- or to say "why don't you talk to Sarah, she's working on the same problem." In an anonymous online setting, you lose that, and students can't connect to each other.

I've used asynchronous online platforms like Piazza, and you lose all the opportunity to listen to students and figure out what exactly they're thinking. Instead you just provide a wall of text for them. And of course students learn to expect responses within hours at any time of day, including weekends, and start getting annoyed if you don't respond quickly to a question posted at 4am Saturday morning. You start to dread the Piazza notifications. Yes, you can set expectations and insist you only answer during certain hours, but other courses will have that one fanatical TA who answers at all hours, and so your students will still be annoyed.

edit: That being said, you're right about students being more willing to use anonymous options. When I lectured online due to COVID, and students could send a direct message to me in the Zoom chat, I got loads of questions. I had to learn to keep the chat open on a second monitor to follow the questions and respond in real-time. As soon as we switched back to in-person teaching, the questions stopped, and the class would just stare at me blankly if I asked if they had questions. But I'm not sure how to replicate that option in person.

> Typically, professors announce office hours during which they will be available to answer questions, so this is not an issue.

Saying something once or even a couple times that is at odds with the listener's inherent behavior doesn't count as communicating.

Insisting it does sounds like the type of out of touch professors GP is talking about.

The zoom option turned teachers into streamers :)

There is some meat in that concept and it's an interesting problem that doesn't have a solid solve yet.

I love remote work,learning,etc but for that free flowing of data in a group or one on one setting it lacks positional audio.

I can't whisper under my breath to the person beside me or break out with a small team and still have people near us hear the convo and maybe chime in.

Tip: stream the class and give them the YT link so they can ask questions. Not ideal but should work and you might find a new process in there.

Cheers

It is too bad COVID couldn't have waited, like, 5-10 more years, we might have had VR zoom by then.

I don't see VR solving the issue per say, the tech is already there it's more a value prop issue, ie how to package it all together and make it work.

Games like DayZ handle positional audio very well but a 3D engine is overkill when it's just audio that is missing.

AR I think will fill this space over VR but time will tell. Imo a solid 2D layout with flexibility to 'move around' is all we need for UI.

It's the audio rules that haven't really been mapped out outside of gaming I'm aware of

I was imagining a VW UI that basically allowed the instructor to walk around and "lean down" to indicate individual focus, but that might be unnecessarily skeuomorphic, maybe you could get 99% of the way there by just moving around a token like in roll20.

> Typically, professors announce office hours during which they will be available to answer questions, so this is not an issue.

True. Also true, students have other classes.

To students raised in an async on demand world the concept of static office hours is fairly foreign. Certainly not top of mind.

Office hours are a compromise. A professor can provide you with individualized help but in a timeboxed manner. One class is no more than something like 20% of a professor's time, either because they are spending most of their time on research or because they are teaching a huge pile of courses as an adjunct. Having professors sit on slack all day ready to respond to asynchronous questions from students is simply not an option.

Isn’t the “a” the entire point of asynchronous communications? (That no one has to sit around all day to respond to them, as the medium is fundamentally async. If a few back-n-forths suggest that escalating to a synchronous medium is needed, that can still happen, but I’d bet well over 50% of initial contacts could be handled effectively totally async.)

Yes and no. My wife is a professor. In the experience of her colleagues, students who want slack/email feedback don't actually have the same definition of "asynchronous" that professors (or you) do. The number of emails received at 11pm regarding an assignment due as 12am is frankly outrageous. There is an expectation of extremely high availability when it comes to these kinds of interactions.

So many professors create a blanket "come to my office hours" approach rather than trying to train students to understand that it might take them 24 hours (or longer - on weekends) to respond to an email.

Perhaps pandering (at least excessively pandering) to people being only willing to use anonymous channels isn’t doing them any life-long favors.

I have my own “don’t feel like dealing with this mildly unpleasant task” hang-ups. I’d likely be more successful and happier if I spent more time overcoming them (to include being forced to).

Your answer confuses me. Background: I studied in Europe, from 2003 to 2010.

Yes, professors had office hours, but you'd usually go there if something was extraordinary, or maybe if you really couldn't find a tutor or someone else to answer your pressing question before the test. We did have tutors, with weekly sessions, those were good for 90% of the stuff. Also it was recent enough that you could indeed write emails and expect an answer (CompSci though)

But that's not the point, your "jump from student to student" confuses me - was this in a lecture hall with multiple people and some sort of panel Q&A? Office hours for us was basically waiting in line in front of the professor's office and going in one by one, also for the most part there were so many people that you'd hardly be remembered as an individual, so your "go talk to Sarah" sounds really unrealistic to me.

But overall I am not disagreeing with you or the author a lot, my main point would more be: if their lecture was being streamed/recorded I probably would not have missed a single lesson, if I was in the position of the students here.

I admit as many students as fit into my office, and talk to them together. For larger classes I have booked larger rooms so ten students can come at once. In those courses, often students will come to work on the homework, and ask questions as they arise, rather than coming with pre-chosen questions. Usually the students are talking to each other as much as they are talking to me.

I would only admit one student at a time if I were giving individual feedback on a project, or answering questions about a take-home exam where collaboration is not allowed, or something like that.

It does seem to be One Weird Trick that nobody knows about: bother the professor and the TAs whenever you need help – whether that's over email or during office hours – and most of them, most of the time, will help. Never had the courage to make use of office hours when I was still in college, and now as a TA I realize how much of a fool I was not to.

Courses in almost all universities are evaluated. Those evaluations actually do matter.

Office hours for academic consultation is the norm.

Apart from anything else, making teaching points via email or any chat app can be a royal PITA, take twice as long and is more open to misunderstanding. Teams and Zoom can be a bit better, but you never know who the student is sharing the room with (parents, little brother etc).

As for the older males thing... Certainly the current climate can make personal consultation an issue in that regard. This is the reason I now compel students to book consultation in small groups.

I don’t see what the issue is here. The professor informs the class of office hours where the door is open. I used these times when I needed to ask a quick question or clarify something. In addition to email.

The idea that these young adults should be treated so sensitively is pretty weird to me. Yes, it can be uncomfortable. Transitioning from childhood to adulthood is full of uncomfortable times.

This quarter I've tried to frame their role (to them) as professional students with their task simply to learn the material using all available resources, including the instructor. I try to stress that they are in charge of how much they learn, not me. (And this isn't me trying to get out of work--I'm still working my ass off.)

We're on the third week now, and I'll reiterate it today.

We'll see if it makes any difference.

> Instead, people email each other, text, chat, video call... help can be synchronous or asynchronous.

> Professors need to get with the times and make themselves available through channels that their students are more comfortable with

If an international student can write the professor, I'm thinking that is already the case. Email at university has been a thing for over thirty years.

"The highest-achieving student was an international student for whom English was not the first language. Yet he wrote me regularly requesting specific topics and textbook pages to prepare for class."

In my short time teaching so far, in 2.25 quarters, only one person has used office hours, and that was over zoom. I have 2 fixed office hours per week, and allow zoom office hours by appointment any time.

On the other hand, I help the students async and at odd hours on Discord every single day.

It seems the more a student should be asking for help, the less likely they are to do so. I spend a fair about of time during the quarter trying to break down that wall.

Kinda offtopic, but thank you for your guide to network programming, it helped me a lot, many years ago.

Glad to hear it! I'm actually teaching network programming right now. The irony is I'm teaching it in Python. :)

I never had a professor who had time to geniunely help other than some quick advice or a bit of feedback. If you're really behind it takes hours of work to catch up (on top of studying).

> Young people can be extremely sensitive to how they impose themselves on other people.

> Professors need to get with the times and make themselves available through channels that their students are more comfortable with

Let’s all do whatever the students believe it is more convenient for them, so they don’t have to impose themselves :-)

(For the benefit of young people who may confused about the timeline of technology in the dark ages, telephones were already quite popular in 1972.)

> Let’s all do whatever the student believe

At this point, I'll trust student sentiment over a professor's insistence any day of the week.

Professors throw out the word "office hours" like it's self-explanatory. It's not. And unless you're a certain type of person, you just won't know or learn how a professor's office hours could help you.

It's not immediately apparent to me (or particularly first generation college students) how swinging by a professor's office hours for 10 minutes on an alternating Thursday is going to help me understand 5-dimensional integrals.

If you're students don't make use of your office hours (and need to), it's a failing on the professor, not the students' culture.

I mean if you don't know what it means you could ask? Or even google? Simply googling "office hours college" is enough to get:

"Office hours are times when you can meet with your professors and teaching assistants to discuss the material being presented in class or other."

That's frankly not enough. That's plenty for a student who is on the cusp of slipping behind -- who's been trained on the culture of college since grade school.

And it's no help at all to the student who is mostly bewildered by the constant swarm of disjoint activity on a college campus. 4x so for a first generation student. These students understand math and exams. The cultural stuff in the middle mostly goes over their heads.

This is a failure to understand responsibility here.

The professor is not responsible for holding your hand and explain every little term—especially terms like “office hours”, which are bog standard at literally every university. This isn’t some arcane obscure term—it’s college classes 101.

College is a useful learning experience for this type of responsibility. You say its not “self-explanatory”? Good! This is a great opportunity for the 18-year-old to learn what to do when something is not obvious. Ask! Don’t just assume it’s irrelevant.

College is a crash course in (small parts of) the real world. If you can’t figure out office hours, you’re gonna have a hard time when it comes to taxes, loans, and other real world things. And the consequences in the real world are much more severe and Real than a bad grade on a problem set.

I'd like to agree. When I was a student, I mostly argued the same myself.

However the sheer size of student populations and the complexity of college life have grown exponentially, and they aren't slowing down. With that in mind, this personal responsibility mindset is quaint.

I think you are greatly over-estimating how often students are seeking help asynchronously. If the professor was actually flooded with texts and emails from engaged students who just have different communication expectations, I think that would have been mentioned in the article especially in the list of possible ways to improve. It seems more likely that the students are not attempting to engage at all.

> but the bemoaning of students not seeking help I find is often linked to professors thinking it's still 1972

I was not alone in this, as of 2010, regularly spending my evenings in office hours with either TAs or professors for specific classes. For certain math classes, I'd do all my homework in a group setting with other students and a TA. It was weird not to go to office hours for extra help.

I mean, every professor sets aside time for office hours, but ignoring them while you are getting in bad shape in a class is a time-honored tradition.

Your years are of “professional experience”, not of “learning complicated things in a bunch”. It is vastly different.

And, well, it is te students who are missing the opportunity…