paper.md

title	tags	authors	affiliations	date	bibliography
A micro-service digital queue with Shibboleth authentication	office hours queue nodejs	name orcid affiliation Genevieve Helsel 0000-0003-2418-1566 1 name orcid affiliation Nathan Walters 0000-0002-5244-9155 1 name orcid affiliation Wade Fagen-Ulmschnedier 0000-0002-7313-7708 1 name orcid affiliation Karle Flanagan 0000-0002-2055-7573 2	name index Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1 name index Department of Statistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2	26 October 2018	paper.bib

Summary

University level courses offer office hours in which students can meet with instructors outside of scheduled class time to get additional help with course materials. Traditionally, these office hours are scheduled in a specific room in which an instructor or group of instructors move around a room and help students in a sporadic manner. While this model works for some courses, it is not one size fits all. Specifically, in courses with a large student to instructor ratio, this model gets too chaotic and difficult to handle, so a more structured and flexible solution is needed.

The Queue is a microservice used by courses to host open office hours. It was designed to be used by courses to remove themselves from the traditional office hours paradigm. It gives a more structured, organized, and simplified approach to office hours. Instead of hosting office hours in a specific room with an unstructured manner of answering questions, instructors can open an online queue system for their course in which students then will add themselves to the queue of questions. Instructors then work down the list of students to answer questions. This allows for much flexibility, as office hours are no longer tied down to a specific location. Questions can be answered strictly in a first come-first serve basis. Students can also see how many questions are unanswered, allowing them to decide if they have the time to come to office hours without physically going there beforehand to get that information. From an analytics perspective, the queue can allow for a course to analyze data about their office hours, for example figuring out the busiest times and staffing those times accordingly.

During the first year of using the queue, interesting uses have arisen from giving users access to a digital queuing tool. Beyond large classrooms, instructors are using the queue as a means of facilitating active learning inside the classroom, advising offices are using it to organize and streamline drop-in advising, and courses are using the queue as a reservation system for one-on-one tutoring sessions.

As the growth of the queue continues at the University of Illinois, several research projects are exploring the impact of the use of a digital queue in place of traditional office hours, the use of the queue in office hours, and interesting trends of data collected as part of the use of the queue in over nearly a dozen courses at Illinois.

The source code for the Queue can be found at https://github.com/illinois/queue