Use New Student First scheduling for online office hours queues and FCFS for in-person queues¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

An implementable queue-management recipe derived from the simulation findings: instructors hosting online office hours should prioritize students who have not yet received help that day (NSF), falling back to FCFS when no such student exists. The article states: "We recommend the instructors use NSF for online office hours queue scheduling." For in-person office hours, FCFS is more appropriate because students rarely return the same day and can see the queue order.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• A ticketing or queue system that records which students have already been helped that day, so NSF selection can be executed

Constraints¶

• The article states NSF's advantage disappears for in-person office hours settings, where students rarely return the same day and would complain about late arrivals being helped early

Target Learners¶

• Students in large CS courses seeking help during office hours

Target Learning Goals¶

• Fair access to instructor help and reduced queue inequity

Related Strategies¶

• Make queue waiting time productive by offering LLM-based help tools such as CodeHelp to waiting students

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Z. Gao, G. S. de Oliveira, D. Babalola, C. Lynch, and S. Heckman. (2024). Who should i help next? simulation of office hours queue scheduling strategy in a cs2 course. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Educational Data Mining. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12729866