Zoom Office Hours

This quarter we will be using a combination of in-person and zoom office hours to make it easier for everyone to access office hours without necessarily needing to make a trip to campus. At the start of the quarter, all office hours will be online until we are able to return to in-person activities on campus.

Zoom office hours will be set up as recurring zoom meetings, with links on the Canvas Zoom page and calendar for the course. Here's how we expect those office hours to work. Please let us know if there are things we could be doing differently to do a better job of helping you.

• You won't be able to connect to an office hour Zoom meeting until the host TA has started the meeting. We won't enable the "allow participants to join before host" setting, so, if you are able to join the meeting, that means the TA is there, although maybe in a breakout room helping someone else right now.


• Office hour Zoom meetings don't have waiting rooms. That means when you can connect to a meeting, you'll be in the main room. Wait there until the TA rejoins the main room if they are currently in a breakout room, and feel free to chat and work with others while you're waiting.


• For the moment we won't attempt to have any official waiting lines or queues. We'll set up something later if needed.
• If your questions concern a programming assignment it is often helpful if you can push the current versions of your code and files to gitlab before you meet with the TA. That way you and the TA have convenient access to all of the files. Your TA might also ask you to share your screen with them or share a screen with you when that helps.

• If lines get long or things are really crowded, the TA on duty will try to get other TAs to join the meeting and help out. Also, if several people have similar questions, it might be possible to work with small groups on a topic to take care of several questions at once -- but that will depend on the questions and what sort of help people need. And feel free to help each other out while you're in the main room waiting for your turn.


• Office hour Zoom meeting are not recorded.