Happy Hours are a Godsend

Office hours that happen in a virtual environment are called virtual office hours. This type of student-faculty interaction can be easily hosted from a faculty computer/mobile device/tablet. With an invitation, students can login to the online session and join their instructor and peers in a virtual space. Using mobile technologies, students can join virtual office hours from a variety of locations including a library, outdoors, on a commute ride home, while caring for children, eating dinner, and even while grocery shopping. Virtual office hours allow for more flexibility of student-faculty interaction. They are an alternative to traditional office hours. This type of student-faculty interaction helps increase students’ trust in the teacher’s care of their learning. This paper describes the design and implementation of virtual office hours for courses in the thermal-fluid sciences (Thermodynamics, Fluid Mechanics, and Heat Transfer). Further, it reports on students’ learning experiences. Introduction A virtual environment can provide students and faculty with more flexibility in meeting time, location, content delivery, and type of interaction. Traditional office hours are historically not well attended [1]. Additionally, an instructor’s office can only hold up to three students. Virtual office hours have no limit on attendance and can also provide a low-stakes platform for discussions, allowing students to better articulate their thought process. Successful virtual sessions are dependent on thoughtful design. Questions that encourage deeper thinking, problemsolving, and critical analysis are essential to student engagement and to the success of a virtual session. To re-conceptualize virtual office hours as more informal settings where student-student, student-content, and student-faculty interactions are enhanced, one engineering instructor and a co-author of this paper, Dr. Krishna Pakala, named them “Happy Hours”. The title of this paper is inspired by an anonymous student comment from the course evaluations. Happy Hours are extra help sessions hosted by an instructor and are held in replacement of traditional in-person office hours. Happy Hours are held twice a week, on the evenings before an in-person lecture. They are typically held around 8:00 pm in order to be available to the largest number of students. These hour-long virtual sessions allow all students to sign onto a shared virtual space, meaning that students can sign in from anywhere at their own convenience (Fig. 1). The instructor shares their iPad screen and communicates through a microphone, while students can communicate with the instructor and each other through instant messaging/microphone on the same platform. Happy Hours are conducted through the video chat platform Zoom, and prior to Fall 2018, the instructor used Blackboard Collaborate to facilitate the same experience. The instructor emails problems to students to be worked in the Happy Hour at least a day before the session. During the Happy Hour, students typically have time to work through practice problems individually, and the professor walks through the solution with the group so that students understand the proper approach and can ask questions on the components they found confusing. These sessions are also recorded and posted to YouTube so that students can revisit them when studying on their own time, and they are available to anyone who was not able to make the session due to time conflicts. These sessions were held for the following courses Thermodynamics, Fluid Mechanics and Heat Transfer. Figure 1. Graphical model of virtual office to demonstrate the adaptability of student schedules.