The recent popularization of virtual office hours (particularly after shifting classes to online mode due to the COVID-19 pandemic) made me recall a couple of papers I wrote on the topic, more than two decades ago, and took me on a trip down memory lane.
If today’s tools of choice for implementing virtual office hours (VOH) include WebEx, Microsoft Teams, Skype, WhatsApp, Hangout, and — of course — Zoom, back in the late 1990s we had fewer (and quite different!) options. The one I selected for a few experiments and surveys was… Microsoft NetMeeting!
Essentially, this is what we did (bold emphasis on aspects that highlight the difference between now and then):
To evaluate the usefulness of specific NetMeeting features for the purpose of distance education, particularly for virtual office hours, students from two sections of the “Introduction to Microprocessor Systems (CDA3331)” course, offered by one of the authors during the Spring’99 semester have been selected to participate in evaluating those aspects.
It is expected that the level of interaction (e.g., text only, one- or two-way audio/video) be limited mainly by the students’ hardware and networking capabilities. However, to what extent the impact that different hardware, software, and especially the quality of the networking connection would have on the overall effectiveness of the approach has remained as an open question that has motivated the authors to design and carry out actual experiments.
So far, eight separate experiments in rather different environments, ranging from low-speed modem dial-up connection from students’ homes to LAN-based connection with two-way audio and video capabilities between one of our computing laboratories and the instructor’s office have been conducted. All experiments have been carried out on a one-to-one and student-to-instructor basis.
In each experiment, a student initiated a dialog by calling the instructor’s office using NetMeeting (dialing the instructor’s network IP address) in a way similar to a phone call. After connection was made, efforts would be directed at attempting to use all possible features of NetMeeting initially. Whenever a specific feature would exhibit problems (e.g. two-way audio), we would fall back to the minimal interaction, i.e. text-based chat, and agree on using whatever tools were available to achieve a satisfactory two-way communication. The subject of the conversations was always related to the course, simulating a live office hour meeting, lasting between 10 to 30 minutes.
(see [2] below)
These were some of the “lessons learned”:
NetMeeting setup can be time-consuming and many students got discouraged after a few unsuccessful attempts.
Students (particularly Computer Science and Engineering students) are always supportive to the introduction of new technology into the educational process and eager to use it to its maximum possible extent. One clear example is the preference for NetMeeting calls over telephone calls to the instructor’s office, despite all the technical difficulties with two-way audio connection over the Internet.
There is a clear and strong dependence between the quality of the connection and the overall satisfaction with the tool. Students who tried it from one of the labs during Spring Break (network traffic was low those days in contrast to car traffic by the beach) had a completely different experience than those who attempted to use NetMeeting from home, in the middle of a busy working day.
For the purposes of VOH, NetMeeting features can be divided into essential, extremely useful, and accessory. In the first group we’d include text-based chat and two-way audio. In the second group, shared whiteboard and application sharing. File transfer and video communication would belong to the last group.
(see [2] below)
The papers in question are:
- O. Marques and S. Hsu, “Assessing the Feasibility of Using Microsoft® NetMeetingTM in Distance Education”, Proc. of the International Conference on Engineering and Computer Education (ICECE’99), August 11-14, 1999, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. [PDF]
- O. Marques, S. Hsu, and N. Sharda, “Virtual Office Hours Using Microsoft® NetMeetingTM“, World Multiconference on Systems, Cybernetics and Informatics (SCI’99 / ISAS’99), Orlando, Florida. [PDF]
Feature image: photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash