Speaker
Description
Drawing on over a decade of teaching, the question motivating this talk emerged most clearly from my experience with large-enrollment introductory physics courses. During six semesters as a member of an instructional team at Michigan Technological University, these courses collectively served nearly 1,000 students from diverse science and engineering disciplines. The question has become newly relevant in PHYS 2306 at Virginia Tech, a large-enrollment course serving nearly 1,000 students across multiple instructors; I currently teach 351 students across three lecture sections.
Students now learn through lectures, recitations, textbooks, videos, recordings, worked solutions, peers, and digital or AI-based tools. Why, despite these resources and instructors’ availability, is direct human support used relatively little?
An anonymous Learning Pulse survey in my current course offers an exploratory perspective. Among 132 voluntary respondents, students commonly reported beginning with asynchronous resources because they are immediate, flexible, and do not require a precisely formulated question. Yet many expressed interest in structured human interaction, particularly small-group problem-solving, topic-centered sessions, guided peer discussion, and online access.
Rather than offering a definitive solution, this talk asks what human support should provide when information and solutions are widely available. I will share observations from both instructional settings, preliminary student perspectives, and an emerging experiment that reframes office hours—which I call Student Hours to make them more inviting—as topic-focused in-person and online problem-solving sessions. Although grounded in introductory physics, the discussion will invite participants to consider whether these patterns arise primarily from the non-major service-course context or signal a broader shift in how students seek and use human support across disciplines.
