A lot of us are hosting online office hours for our students these days. Based on what I’ve seen from my colleagues as well as folks posting on social media, a lot of people are scheduling an hour of time and just hanging out in a Google Meet or Zoom meeting waiting for students to drop-in to ask questions. There’s nothing inherently wrong with doing that unless you have students who want to ask questions that shouldn’t be discussed in front of other students. You may also find that when you schedule students for specific, individual meetings they are more likely to appear. That’s been the case for me with two of my students.

One way to schedule individual online meetings with students is to use a combination of Google Calendar, Google Classroom, and Zoom. In the video that is embedded below I demonstrate how that works. In short, you create recurring meetings in Zoom then insert the links to those meetings into the details for appointment slots in Google Calendar. Then when students sign-up for a meeting through your Google Calendar appointment page they will have the link and the meeting time available in their own Google Calendars.