This is the first post in a series of posts documenting the creation of BeaverHours, a Microsoft Teams bot which handles office hours queueing.
Chat-based bots are a large part of advanced server functionality on instant messaging platforms. Those familiar with Twitch probably know Nightbot, which allows streamers to manage their chat moderation, is ubiquitous on the platform; in broader terms, the top Discord bots boast installs on millions of servers. It’s clear that bots are a good tool for automating administrative tasks in chat servers, which is why I and my partners, Jack Donkers and Rohit Chaudhary have decided to build a bot for Oregon State University’s official communication platform, Microsoft Teams, which helps TAs and professors manage queues of students and questions during office hours.
The problem we have each encountered was that virtual office hours have a lot of room for improvement from an organizational standpoint; busy chatrooms scroll by faster than they can be read, questions go unanswered unless they’re repeated by the asker several times, and sessions commonly end with outstanding unanswered questions. Having an ordered system by which instructors may take questions is crucial to keeping office hours on track and relevant to student learning outcomes.
This was the motivation for BeaverHours, our team’s proposed Microsoft Teams chatbot. Our goal was to increase transparency and reduce administrative overhead in office hours by creating a bot that efficiently fields and queues questions for course staff and allows them to focus on the true reason for office hours: sharing knowledge and helping students get past sticking points.
At the time of writing, the implementation details for BeaverHours are still being planned out; ultimately, it’s the team’s true hope that our project be used wherever students attend office hours in droves.
