Students scheduling appointments with faculty

[Charlie Morris]

 

I've had a few requests lately, and many a time in the past for that matter, for an online tool to facilitate students signing up for time slots on a faculty's calendar.  This is for advising, mock interviews and lots of other stuff I imagine would apply too.

 

Do any of you know  if there are any options available right now?  Or would we have to use something third party?  Just curious especially with the students moving to Google, maybe something has changed.

 

If anyone on campus is using something or built something to facilitate this, I would love to hear about it.

Thanks.

[Nick Young]

This was a subject brought up in the NexGen (employee email) committee, and there was a pretty obvious solution:

1. The faculty member (if they had a Google account), could simply create a sub-calendar
2. Give permission to whoever they want (public, specific people)
3. Let permitted people request appointments, that can then be approved, denied etc

You can set up free busy times, as well as work hours on google calendar, so, assuming everyone is on the same system (employees AND students), then this type of situation would be as easy as employees scheduling appointments with other employees....something that's been going on for years.

Seems like there would be no need to "build" something if we could just all get on the same system.

[Charlie Morris]

Yes! <chant>Do it!</chant>

Until that day... any other thoughts? People using other stuff? Doodle.com is a really simple non-fancy solution. Any other more elegant/fancy solutions out there? Anything that is working fine for someone?

[Garrison Locke]

In my class last semester, we had to schedule a time to meet with the instructor, and we use a signup sheet that we passed around the room. I know it's pretty high-tech, but most people seemed to understand how to use the system. :-P

But seriously, we use Doodle to schedule the accessibility committee meetings, and that seems to work pretty well, but that's not really the same situation. That's just picking a single time that works for everyone, not a bunch of times for individual meetings.

I don't know of anything other than a Google calendar like Nick suggested that would work very well. Seems like that's the obvious and simplest solution.

[Charlie Morris]

Well, you could use Doodle for this if you say to a student, hey, only pick one slot.

Blackboard Vista and Moodle have sign up options too, but again, not integrated with a faculty calendar.

My first suggestion to the people who ask is indeed paper/pencil or use the phone :), KISS method.

[Jonathan Champ]

We used Doodle to set up our individual meetings at the beginning of this year. Just need to get people to list their availability for for a week or so and then schedule their appointments so that everyone gets a time that works for them. Worked out beautifully.