OfficeHours

We have created the world's first Online Collaboration Platform, purpose-built for personalized learning. Our platform allows learners to connect on-demand, 24/7 - either with each other or with experienced Teaching Assistants, each of whom is qualified to give course-specific help.

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OfficeHours Releases OCP 1.0 - A Collaboration Platform for Online Learners

Phoenix, Arizona, April 24, 2014 - OfficeHours announced today the release of OCP 1.0, the world's first online collaboration platform purpose built for online higher-ed learners.  OCP 1.0 provides unrivaled ability for online learners to connect both with each other and with course-specific teaching assistants.  OCP 1.0 is a browser-based technology and is certified as LTI compliant.  This allows for easy integration into the leading LMS platforms, including Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Canvas, Moodle and Sakai. 

  "OCP 1.0 has the potential to revolutionize online learning by enabling online students to find each other and connect in a secure social environment, and to get instant expert help when they need it," said Jeff Levy, co-founder and CEO of OfficeHours.

  OfficeHours is based on the groundbreaking work of co-founder Rich DeMillo, Distinguished Professor and director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at the Georgia Institute of Technology. DeMillo's seminal book, Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities, forms the intellectual foundation for the work of OfficeHours.

  OfficeHours offers an enterprise license version of OCP 1.0 to universities for use with their on-campus courses.  The module integrates directly into university LMS systems and allows students to see others in their courses that are online and to connect with teaching assistants on demand in a secure online collaborative workspace.

  "During the past year, OfficeHours has worked closely with seven different Georgia Tech professors to discover ways of engaging and supporting a community of students far greater than any on campus classroom could hold,” said Mike McCracken, Director of Online Course Development at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  “Through their professor-centric approach, OfficeHours has added powerful new features for our MOOCs without creating additional work for faculty.”

  OfficeHours also offers OCP 1.0 at no cost to any professor teaching a massive open online course (MOOC).  The service is offered as a "freemium" model, with online learners able to connect to other students free of charge.  Students are also able to attend live review sessions led by teaching assistants for no cost.  Students pay for one-on-one tutoring by teaching assistants and to view archived review sessions.

  “With thousands of students in my class, it was critical to my family and job responsibilities to keep MOOC student communications contained to a manageable platform like OfficeHours.  I was delighted to offer a means to support my students in real time while also protecting my private information and minimizing the reveal of my personal contact information,” said Dr. Anissa Vega of Kennesaw State University, who teaches a MOOC, K-12 Blended and Online Learning, on the Coursera platform.

  “I’ve found OfficeHours very useful in the MOOC courses I have offered via Coursera.  I am able to set up weekly study sessions with my students (from around the world) in real time and work engineering problems together with the students to enhance the learning environment,” said Dr. Wayne Whiteman of Georgia Tech, who has taught three different MOOCs on the Coursera platform.  “What is awesome is that I am even able to record those student sessions and provide the link to my students who were unable to attend.  This tool has been a great resource both for me and my students, and I intend to continue to use it in the future.”

Contact: Liz Lapidus

Liz Lapidus Public Relations

404/.688-1466, [email protected]

  About OfficeHours

Co-founded by former Hewlett-Packard CTO Rich DeMillo and serial entrepreneur Jeff Levy, OfficeHours has created the world’s first web-based online collaboration platform enabling online learners, including the millions of students now taking massive open online courses (MOOCs), to connect on-demand with each other and with course-specific teaching assistants.

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Audio Chat Within The Course Feed

This week OfficeHours launched audio chat from within the Course Feed. Now, each new post to the Feed will create its own unique audio channel that up to 40 participants can join at a time. With the addition of audio capabilities, we are increasingly establishing ourselves as the real-time compliment to asynchronous (and impersonal) discussion forums. We have already seen this new capability creating interesting and promising results.

Probably our favorite post of this past week was from the Introduction to Psychology as a Science course. A student in Mauritius Africa posted a question looking for advice in helping her six year old cousin with dyslexia. Within seconds one of our TAs in Greece began offering up useful links and thoughts. Soon after, another student from Brazil joined in on the conversation. Giving online learners a platform where they can make their education personal and collaborative is something that we think has both real benefit and tremendous long-term potential.

We generally try to include in these updates something in the larger online learning space that has us excited. This week, we've been enjoying Professor Brian Greene's ambitious new project, "World Science U." In his approach to online teaching, you can see a much greater focus on making the content not only informative but also entertaining and interactive.  There are great possibilities here.

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Welcome to the New OfficeHours

Welcome to the new Officehours! Since our first release two months ago, we have learned a a great deal about what works and whats missing in online learning. Most importantly, we have seen a widespread need for a simple platform to enable instant, real-time discussions for MOOC students. So we created a new feature called The Feed that is the central hub for all course conversations. You can ask questions, share links, organize a study group, or start a debate all in one simple interface. Each post to the Feed generates its own corresponding text chat that anyone can join. Please go give the new OfficeHours a try (www.officehours.co). Post a fun link or interesting idea, connect with some of your fellow learners, and let us know what you think!

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Online Learning as Community Building

We have been really fascinated in a surge in interest around the intersection of online learning and online social communities: MOOCs: The Next Social Networking Platform. This is a great  article that references a new initiative at Harvard to strengthen alumni engagement by offering continuing education opportunities directed at the alumni community. The potential of MOOCs not just to educate individuals but also to build communities is something that we keyed in on very early in the development of OfficeHours. And it remains central to our product vision and company focus. 

Please leave us your comments and ideas on how you think a community of learners differs from other types of social networks.  For example, what types of features help you collaborate with someone versus just staying in touch?  Do good classmates make good friends - and vice versa?

If you haven't yet had an opportunity to see our growing community in action, you can do so here: www.OfficeHours.co. 

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The Where and When of Online Learning

What has occupied our focus of late is how to bring our offerings more directly to where and when students learn.  We originally devised the OfficeHours browser extension as a way to enable instant connectivity - no matter where they were on the web, people could be easily reached and then routed into a live session with another student and/or teaching assistant.  Going forward, we are continuing to find ways to improve the usefulness of the browser extension by making it more than a switchboard.  We want OfficeHours' collaboration tools to co-exist seamlessly on the same page as a Coursera video or a Wikipedia article or wherever else online learning may occur.  To give you a preview of things to come, check out these projects that we have drawn inspiration from: Gravity and ReadrBoard.

Though OfficeHours is a business, we are motivated by the extraordinary potential that online education has to shape the lives of those it reaches. But democratizing access to education does not meant that all education has to come from one source.  One of the most interesting articles we saw this week was a profile of a company called Descomplica that is leading the online learning revolution in Brazil.  While it has been up to this point a video content provider, the company has aspirations to become "the go-to, full-service online classroom for Brazil."  These ambitions are an encouraging reminder for us that the services we are building and the problems we are solving have a truly global marketplace.

As always, if you have any thoughts, ideas, or questions, please don't hesitate to be in touch - [email protected]. And you can always follow along with our progress as a user by creating an account at OfficeHours.co. 

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Who and How Do You Ask for Help?

One of the biggest surprises for us so far has been the way students ask questions. Our initial assumption had been that because students wanted instant, on-demand help, they would be inclined to select the "First Available TA" option when submitting a question. But so far we have seen that students prefer being able to choose their specific TA.  This actually wasn't all that easy to facilitate in our original design because it our interface only displayed a small selection of all the TAs available. So this past week, we overhauled the question-asking process to allow for easier searching and filtering of TAs. We hope to discover in the weeks ahead which kinds of characteristics are most determinative of how students decide whether a TA is a good fit.

Finally, I wanted to give you three links that really speak to us in our ongoing process of learning, adjusting, and improving OfficeHours. The TED website has a new blog feature called "Since the Talk" - a Q&A follow up with past speakers that focuses on how their projects are progressing. This week, they have been highlighting a series of MOOC leaders including Daphne Koller, Sebastian Thun, and Anant Agarwal. The interviews make for fascinating reading, and there are also links back to the original TED Talks if you missed them.

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OfficeHours - Beyond Q&A

One of the questions that we get asked most frequently about OfficeHours is how we differentiate our platform from traditional Q&A forums.  At a basic level, OfficeHours is an additive and complimentary tool to forums. Where forums are asynchronous notes, OfficeHours provides real-time discussion. We don't want to replace forums; we want to offer a suite of collaboration tools that are currently not available in them. 

But more than a technical distinction, we view OfficeHours as enabling a very different kind of communication. We are building OfficeHours so that it is not only the resource of last resort when you need help, but it's the place you come to react, collaborate and discuss. It is where you learn with and from other students.  And it is the place where you will continue that discussion even after the course officially ends. Over the coming weeks we will be adding a number of exciting new features to really encourage that immediacy and connectedness between online learners. 

Also, if you haven't had a chance yet, please take a look at a  blog post written by Jeff Levy, the founder of OfficeHours, on Edukwest. The post was motivated by a recent article in The New Republic, but more broadly by a larger strain of illogical criticism towards MOOCs. As I begin: "Analysis in The New Republic of a recent survey of 35,000 MOOC students . . . leveled as a criticism the finding that most students do not view these courses either as a means to a college degree or a new job. Given that none of these courses are accredited, one wonders how a student could possibly use them as a means to a college degree?" 

Just this week, Coursera has offered up its own response to this question in the form a a new "Specialization" track. As Coursera describes the new offerings: "These Specializations make it easy to master new skills and deepen your expertise in subjects that interest you. Advance your career and enhance your resume with official recognition from exceptional schools with a unique Specialization Certificate."