Google Calendar Bookable Slots

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Navigating to Google Calendar directly; Go to any Google page. In the top-right corner of the screen, click the grid icon, then click Calendar. Click the calendar for when you want office hours to start. Next, click and drag the time slot down until the desired end time. (If you want to move the entire time slot, put your mouse cursor in the.

It’s no secret in education that a critical component of being a successful educator is providing opportunities for direct interactions between students and faculty. From allowing students to clarify their understanding of difficult concepts to resolving important questions on the course structure, making faculty available to students is important in addressing individual learning needs. Sometimes just five or 10 minutes of one-on-one interaction can transform the educational experience.

Office hours play a key role in ensuring student success. But as students and educators know, scheduling office hours isn’t always a smooth process. From difficulties arranging individual appointment times to the long wait times associated with drop-in style sessions, the office hour experience is often not a positive one. And while the importance of providing opportunities for student contact may be greater now more than ever – large remote classes can often be an impersonal experience – the challenges of scheduling appointment slots have only increased. Gone are the days of paper signup sheets. The long lines that used to stretch around corridors have now transitioned to long email chains.

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The process of arranging office hours need not be a challenging one, though. As a university lecturer who believes in the importance of making it easy for students to meet with faculty, I can vouch that Doodle is possibly the simplest way of setting up office hours.

In Google Calendar, you have now two options when creating new appointment: event and appointment slots. By selecting appointment slots, you are directed to further options. Here you can set how long the appointment will be, whether it is one session or session consisting of many parts, bookable separately. Upon arrival at UCT, staff and students are provisioned with an email account. UCT staff, postdoctoral fellows and those third parties who are entitled to an email account have a preferredname.surname@uct.ac.za email address. You can do this using the Google Calendar appointment slots. Here’s how it works. You set up the Appointment Slots in your calendar with times, locations, descriptions etc. You share a link to your Appointment Calendar with your students. Students will have to be logged in with their Sheffield Hallam credentials to access the calendar.

As illustrated below, you can create signup slots within five minutes, saving you time and making the whole process much more inviting for students.

Understanding Doodle Bookable Calendar slots

The real strength of using Doodle to help arrange office hours is its simplicity and flexibility. Doodle’s straightforward approach for creating Bookable Calendar slots is perfect for even the most technically adverse, with customization options that work for educators of all levels. Plus, the intuitive sign-up process makes it inviting and simple for students to complete.

Step 1: Connecting your calendar

One of the many advantages of using Doodle Bookable Calendar slots is its ability to integrate directly with both Google Calendar and Office 365. Scheduled meetings booked with Doodle will integrate directly with your primary calendar, and any other meetings you enter in your calendar will sync with Doodle, automatically preventing that time from being reserved by students.

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Step 2: Creating a Bookable Calendar

After you have connected your external calendar, you can start entering the basic information of your office hours. This includes:

  1. Calendar Title: A way of making it clear to your students that they are signing up for the correct calendar
  2. Customizable Link: A link that you can share with your students by email or on your course wall. This is customizable, again helping to make clear to your students what the link is for.
  3. Description: This can be useful in adding further instructions, for example, directing your students to sign up for one meeting slot.
  4. Location: For in-person office hours, this can be used to remind students of your office location. For online office hours, this box can be used to add in the link to your online meeting room. If you are using Zoom, Doodle has further options available to create an individual meeting link for each meeting, so you can leave this box blank.
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Step 3: Setting available meeting times

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The next stage in configuring your office hours is to block off the periods when you will be available to meet with students. This helps you ensure that the meeting times work for you and avoids the possibility of student meetings encroaching on your entire week. While the time slots conveniently carry over week to week, if there is a week that you are unavailable for a specific block of time, you can simply create an event in your connected calendar, mark it as ‘busy’ and those times will automatically be removed from the Bookable Calendar on Doodle.

Doodle also detects the user’s location, so while the meeting times that you create are all in your time zone, any student located in a different part of the world will see the available meeting slots in their local time.

Step 4: Defining meeting details

The Bookable Calendar meeting slots created in Doodle are customizable in the following ways.

  1. Meeting Length: Specify how long you want meetings to last. If you want more than one meeting length (for example, 15 minutes for office hour slots, but one-hour slots for group meetings), just create two separate Bookable Calendars. Since the separate calendars all sync with your main calendar, if a meeting is booked on one, that time option will automatically be removed from the other Bookable Calendar.
  2. Future Horizon: The future horizon option is a great way of restricting how far in advance students can book appointments. For example, you are able to restrict sign ups to only the next two weeks. This gives you the flexibility to make other commitments, without having to worry that a student may have already booked that time with you far in advance.
  3. Minimum Notice: Another great feature to help you stay in control of your calendar is the ability to set a minimum notice period. By ensuring that students must sign up a specific amount of time in advance, you can structure your day accordingly, without having to worry if suddenly you will get a last minute flurry of students signing up to meet.
  4. Buffer Time: Meeting back-to-back with students can be tiring. So it can be useful to factor in a buffer time between meetings to allow some time to regroup or to simply take a quick break. All you have to do is select the buffer time you want between each meeting slot.

Step 5: Adding in custom questions

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The final step in configuring your office hours, and one that can help ensure that your office hour meetings go much smoother, is to collect additional information from students. For example, asking in advance what the students want to discuss can help you to prepare ahead of time, taking off the pressure on the day. If you teach multiple classes or sections, it can also be useful to collect this information, avoiding the need for you to look these details up.

Step 6: Previewing available slots

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At this point, you’re all done setting up the Bookable Calendar for your office hours and can preview how the meeting will look when students are signing up.

Students can sign up directly from the link without needing to create an account and will receive a confirmation of the booking by email. The appointment will also automatically sync with your main calendar, helping to alleviate any danger of forgetting the appointment.

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Students also have the ability to directly reschedule a meeting from their confirmation email, saving you the time of having to coordinate an alternative date.

A few minutes later…the headache of scheduling your office hour slots is solved

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Doodle is one of the easiest ways of scheduling student office hours. As illustrated above, it only takes one to two minutes to create a Bookable Calendar link that can be shared with students, enabling you to schedule office hour appointments with minimal oversight.

The versatility of the meeting scheduling options available in Doodle means that once you’ve experienced the power of scheduling with Doodle, you may find yourself using it beyond just booking office hours to arrange all your other meetings. You’ll never want to go back to manually scheduling meetings via email again.

To learn how to leverage the features of Doodle to improve your education meetings, check out “The Educator’s Meeting Playbook.”