Virtual Office Hours

Faculty Instructions

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to Virtual Office Hours, a new method for communicating with students in your chemistry class using the Internet address at http://www.chem.ucla.edu/VOH. We have designed the project to have several levels of participation:

Online posting of instructional materials
Online posting of questions and answers
Private Student-Instructor communication

The first level deals with presenting static documents such as old exams, exam keys, handouts, problem sets and the like to students online. Students can read all materials online, download them, or print them directly from VOH.

The second level presents a forum for students to post questions about your class. Using the link "Submit a Question" on your class home page, students can post questions. This link will then post the questions for viewing in order of increasing age from the "View Unanswered Questions" link. After questions have been answered, students can view all questions and the answers from the "View Answered Questions" link. These features can be disabled if you do not want your students to submit questions.

The third level provides a way for students to send confidential messages directly to you via email. This feature can be disabled if you do not want your students to submit confidential messages to you.

UPLOADING DOCUMENTS TO VOH

There are several ways to send us documents to be uploaded to VOH, but the first is the most convenient. Documents created with MS Word or CSC ChemDraw on a Macintosh are the easiest to work with, but we will try to work with whatever form you have. Overall, you will only have to send documents to VOH and we will upload them within 48 hours.

Attach the documents to an E-mail and send to voh@chem. Within Eudora (or any other POP3 client) you can attach documents to an email and they will be encoded into ascii and sent.
Archive the files then email. All of the files to be sent can be compressed into one with Stuffit (or the like) and then attached to an email.
We have set up a Macintosh File Server to which you can connect and directly deposit documents. Using your chooser select AppleShare and you_che and then select "Scanner Rm Power PC". Enter the username "VOH" and the password "lasix" and select "Macintosh HD" and simply copy your documents to the "Spring 96 Folder". E-mail voh@chem to let us know material is there.
You can copy the files to disk and mail us the disk.
If you have handwritten or other non-electronic material for posting, it must first be scanned. Mary Anne will scan initial course materials to get your course started for the quarter and then one of your TA's will have to scan the rest using the Departmental scanning facility. The TA should send a E-mail to voh@chem requesting uploading of each new batch of scanned documents.

ANSWERING QUESTIONS AND POSTING ANNOUNCEMENTS

To answer student questions or to post announcements for your class, go to the following URL: http://www.chem.ucla.edu/VOH/profs/qaarf.html. Enter your last name (all lower case) for username and your password ( ), select your class, select "Answer a Question" or "Submit an Announcement" and then click on "Create Submission Form".

The "Answer a Question" form will generate a second form which has four fields:

A question field that contains the text of the first question to be answered.
A check box that allows for deletion of the question without answering it.
A check box that allows for skipping the question without answering it.
An answer field where you can type the answer to the question.

To answer the question, simply type the answer in and select the "Submit" button when finished. You may edit the question if the student made a really annoying spelling error etc. If the question is redundant or inappropriate, it can be deleted by checking the checkbox. If the question is a violation of UCLA's use policy (http://www.ucla.edu:80/campus/computing/policies/) please send a message to voh@chem. After submitting the answer, the question and answer pair are prepended into the "Answered Questions" file in the home directory of your class and the original question is automatically deleted from the "Unanswered Questions" file. Changes to your submitted answer require manual editing, so E-mail change requests to voh@chem. To answer more questions click twice on the "back" button on Netscape.

The "Submit an Announcement" form generates a form where you can type in announcements.

Notes: Carriage returns are not recognized in the response fields. Instead, you can format your announcements and answers, by typing <br> or <p>. The characters <br> are equivalent to a carriage return and the characters <p> are equivalent to a carriage return and line feed. The cache feature of Netscape may make it appear that new information is not instantly uploaded. You can select "Reload" to update a page or change your Netscape to "Check Documents: Every Time" in Options:Preferences:Cache in Netscape versions 1.2 or lower, or Options:Network Preferences in Netscape versions 2 and above.

CONFIDENTIAL MAIL

VOH allows students the option of a "Confidential" post, unless we disable it for your class. This will send their comment or question directly to you as E-mail. You will receive email at whatever email address you use from "nobody@chem.ucla.edu". Respond to these mailings as you wish, but remember that you must use the Student Email Address, since replying to "nobody" will get you nowhere.

REMINDER ROBOT

A VOH robot will check your class file every morning at 6:00 am to check on questions to be answered and will E-mail you a note on the number of pending questions.

voh@chem.ucla.edu // Last revision: April 2, 1996