Some feel the Internet may be undermining office hours, as students opt to e-mail professors rather than visit them. Now one university is bringing office hours to the Internet.
Stanford University bills its new Open Office Hours experiment as a public version of the old weekly tradition. Only in this forum you don’t need perfect SAT’s and a 4.0 GPA for the privilege of interacting with the California university’s professors.
It’s free. It’s open to anyone on Facebook. And it’s sort of like video blogging. Faculty members share their thoughts in introductory clips. They respond to questions in follow-up videos.
The most recent to open his office is Philip G. Zimbardo. The professor emeritus of psychology gained fame with the Stanford Prison Experiment, a study that showed disturbing levels of violence among men in a simulated prison.
“Yo! It’s Phil Zimbardo,” is how the professor opens his video, which drew more than 70 comments. Mr. Zimbardo tells the audience that he is “especially concerned” about all those former students “who never came to my office hours, and I was sitting there wasting my time.”
Ian Hsu, Stanford’s director of Internet media outreach, calls the new project “a natural evolution of the university’s existing efforts to make its discoveries and knowledge easily and widely accessible online via Stanford on YouTube, Stanford on iTunes U, and Stanford Engineering Everywhere.“ —Marc Parry
