A major concern with increasing student numbers is maintaining the quality of the student experience. Faculty employ both pedagogical approaches and educational technologies to reach ever-increasing numbers of students. While numerous approaches have been successfully deployed in the classrooms of large enrollment courses (for example, iClickers), office hours are often administered in the traditional method which does not account for, nor take advantage of, large student enrollments. As our large courses continue to grow larger, office and lab hours become crowded. Traditionally, students raise their hand or add their name to a whiteboard list to get assistance from course staff. In these settings, course staff may find themselves repeatedly answering the same or similar questions. Students may wait for long periods before getting help from an instructor. Shy students may be hesitant to ask for help or be overpowered by more aggressive personalities. While some office hours are crowded, others have very few students coming in, and rarely do we capture any analytics on utilization or usefulness of these one-to-one interactions with students.
To facilitate office hours in large courses, we have previously described the development of an online queuing software for educational use. While the tool was initially developed for office hours in large enrollment courses, the Queue has been adopted in several additional use cases including advising, peer learning, and active learning. In these early adoption cases, we have identified benefits of implementing the Queue in educational settings, including saving time for students and instructors and expanding learning environments beyond classrooms and faculty offices. Further, the Queue can collect rich data that can help instructors identify common questions or “muddiest points”. Instructors can use this data to assess course delivery, content, and performance of course staff. Overall, these benefits and features of the Queue provide educators with an easy-to-use tool for working with large student numbers. Here we present our findings from combining user surveys and interviews to present the use of the Queue in diverse educational settings.
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9456-5042
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
[biography]
Karin Jensen, Ph.D. is a Teaching Assistant Professor in bioengineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include student mental health and wellness, engineering student career pathways, and engagement of engineering faculty in engineering education research. She was awarded a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation for her research on undergraduate mental health in engineering programs. Before joining UIUC she completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Sanofi Oncology in Cambridge, MA. She earned a bachelor's degree in biological engineering from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Virginia.
Dr Amos joined the Bioengineering Department at the University of Illinois in 2009 and is currently a Teaching Associate Professor in Bioengineering and an Adjunct Associate Professor in Educational Psychology. She received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering at Texas Tech and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from University of South Carolina. She completed a Fulbright Program at Ecole Centrale de Lille in France to benchmark and help create a new hybrid masters program combining medicine and engineering and also has led multiple curricular initiative in Bioengineering and the College of Engineering on several NSF funded projects.
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9762-7181
University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign
[biography]
Lawrence Angrave is an award winning Fellow and Teaching Professor at the department of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His interests include (but are not limited to) joyful teaching, empirically-sound educational research, campus and online courses, computer science, engaging underrepresented students, improving accessibility and creating novel methods that encourage new learning opportunities and foster vibrant learning communities.
Karle Flanagan is a Senior Instructor of Statistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has taught introductory statistics to thousands of students at UIUC since Spring of 2014. She also serves as the MS advisor for the statistics department. In 2018, she was awarded the Illinois Student Government’s Teaching Excellence Award and in February of 2019, she also won the highest level teaching award at UIUC, the Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. She completed her undergraduate degree in mathematics, with a minor in secondary education. She previously has taught mathematics and worked as a statistician in the insurance industry. Along with teaching, she is currently working on course development for other advanced statistics courses and data science courses using Python. Her research interests include online education, optimizing efficiency in office hours for large classes, and active learning methods for undergraduate statistics instruction.
Dave is an Instructional Technology Facilitator with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Engineering IT Shared Services. He helps instructors select and integrate technologies into their courses to enhance student learning and improve course administration.
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9673-9832
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
[biography]
Christopher D. Schmitz was born in Pana, Illinois in 1969. An Electrical Engineer, he received his BS with University Honors in 1993 and his MS in algorithmic fault-tolerant adaptive systems in 1996 from the University of Illinois. He completed his Ph.D. in multi-user cellular communication in 2002 from the University of Illinois.
He worked for TRW Space and Electronics Group from 1995 until 1997 and at the University of Illinois from 2002 to present. His research interests are in adaptive digital signal processing, digital communications, and education pedagogy. He currently serves the ECE department of the University of Illinois as a Teaching Associate Professor and an undergraduate advisor and is working to improve undergraduate education as an Education Innovation Fellow (EIF) in the Grainger College of Engineering.
http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-7313-7708
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
[biography]
Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Computer Science at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). With a passion for data, he serves as the lead instructor of CS 225 (Data Structures) and works with students on numerous data visualizations that have accumulated over 10,000,000 interactions. In 2016, he was selected as one of the National Academy of Engineering's Frontiers of Engineering Education scholars; in 2017, he was awarded the Collins Award for Innovative Teaching; and he has been consistently ranked as an excellent instructor by his students for the past ten years.
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