How Universities Are Quietly Restructuring Office Hours
Empty office hours have prompted several universities to reconsider the format. The redesigns produce measurably higher engagement and shift student-faculty relationships.
A tradition at many universities across the United States for over a century are so-called “office hours” during which faculty and students can meet one-on-one. For the majority of universities, these are held on a weekly basis during which students can come to the office of their professor to ask for explanations of certain issues or to receive feedback on their performance. The percentage of students that make use of office hours on a regular basis is however relatively small, while the majority of students does not using them at all. Researchers from 14 universities in the US have been studying the re-design of office hours for several years now. The outcome of their research was published in a 2025-study.
The Restructuring Approaches
Some universities have moved the time when students can go to the office hours of a faculty member from his or her office to a more public space such as a library, student center, or a departmental lounge. Others have set up so-called study labs, where students work on their academic assignments while a faculty member is present to assist when needed. A third approach involves integrating the time for office hours with the time of a class and having the end of the lecture early in order to allow time for studying in an informal discussions between faculty and students.
What Has Worked
Structuring and formats for increasing engagement, that is, those approaches to restructure office hours which have been by far the most effective in significantly increasing the number of students that engage in these hours, share some essential elements: They reduce a lot of the implicit barriers to enter into a faculty member’s office for hour(s) and they make it clear to students that there is no requirement to have come up with any particular question(s) or issue(s) that the student is currently struggling with. Often, but not necessarily, they also create ways for significant amounts of continuity to be structured into the spaces between more formal interactions.
The Common Space Model
Hold Common Space Hours: Hold your hours in common study and gathering spaces, like libraries, student unions, etc. Instead of holding hours in your closed office faculty can hold hours in open spaces on campus where they can more easily be seen and accessed by students. According to a faculty member at the University of Michigan his hours went from being attended by 40% of his students to 60% after he held his hours in the Cooley Law Library. Michigan is not an isolate in this regard. Faculty members at the University of Wisconsin reported similar increases in the number of students who attended their hours when they held in common spaces on campus. And, of course, there is no need to add resources to hold hours in common spaces already on campus. So it is a great option for faculty and for universities. Stay flexible.
Another valuable insight from someone who does this for a living (university counseling) is something that most guides on office hours will not tell you.
The Study Lab Model
On the other hand, the study lab approach – where faculty hold hours in a study space and students work on assignments during the hours, coming and going as needed and asking questions as they arise – has resulted in higher levels of engagement at the few institutions where it has been implemented. In this model, the number of students attending hours is far greater than in traditional settings, as students attend to work on their coursework and can ask questions as they arise while completing their work.
The Integration with Class
There are several models for restructuring the faculty office hours to integrate more with the classroom. By ending class 15 to 20 minutes early, for example, some faculty have been able to create space for a study session with students in the classroom. The biggest draw of this model is that both the faculty and the students are already in the classroom for the lecture portion of the class, so why not make use of that space for a study session as well. A potential drawback is that the reduced amount of time for the lecture portion of class could be used to present even more information to the students, and therefore the professor could end up talking for just as long, just in a different setting.
The Faculty Adoption Question
The restructuring of office hours also requires the willingness of faculty to change established practices. As long as faculty feel that they need to have dedicated office time without students present, then there will be little movement to change. Many of the universities that have made the greatest progress in increasing student engagement in office hours have framed their efforts as experiments to which there are specific measurable goals. If the goals are met, then the practice becomes standard.
What Students Should Know
For students, the way that the university delivers certain resources is more important than whether those resources are available. In other words, the mode of delivery can greatly affect the extent to which that resource is accessible to students. If a student thinks that a particular faculty member’s office hours are not accessible, then that student is unlikely to attend office hours for that faculty member, regardless of how formally available those hours are. If, on the other hand, a student thinks that a faculty member’s office hours are accessible, then that student is very likely to attend office hours for that faculty member in order to build a relationship that can be very positive for that student throughout their undergraduate career.
A friend who works in this space gave me the best tip on all of this. It is not in most of the articles on the space.
The Broader Picture
Viewing the exercise of restructuring to hold more accessible office hours within the broader framework of the university’s many resources that result in limited return on investment due to being organized in a particular fashion, the institutions which look at resource delivery are more likely to arrive at some significant understanding of how to organize resources to arrive at different university outcomes.
The Faculty Workload Implication
Engagement through restructured office hours may require higher faculty time investment in the short term and therefore can imply higher faculty workload. Universities that have moved in this direction also attempt to address faculty workload in other areas of service, for example, by granting teaching credit for such hours or by lowering expectations in other service categories. Without such adjustments, however, such programs may hit the roadblock of faculty resistance.
The Student Behavior Change
The most successful restructurings of office hours are those that change students’ behavior slowly, rather than expecting them to shift dramatically from not going to office hours at all. The university has to, through first-year programming as well as subsequent years of programming, make going to office hours “the norm” for students. Failure to get students to view going to office hours as normal will fail to bring up attendance, even with the best of office hours’ restructurings.
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