Home - Malopla/SDD-Project GitHub Wiki

Welcome to the Online Office Hours wiki!

This is a project for a course at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Software Design and Documentation (SDD)

While traditional office hours provide students a stable tutoring mechanism, many college students have class during professors’ office hours, or teaching assistants who are unreliable when responding to emails, making it difficult to find help that is effective. Although private tutoring services exist to provide supplements to office hours, many of these service often fail to live up to their users’ expectations. Online Office Hours(name subject to change) is a web service designed to crowdsource the concept of office hours, providing tutoring and homework help to address these students’ needs from students themselves.

Users must register accounts, which can be updated at any time to accommodate students’ changing schedules, and for tutors to offer help in a wider ranges of subjects. Users can then post what subjects they need help with(or can help others with) and what times they are available. Online Office Hours will then match students with tutors based on similar needs and schedules. The service also provides a messaging system, so that after being matched, students and tutors can ask and answer questions, or arrange in-person meetings if they study at the same university. Since the scope of Online Office Hours is global rather than RPI-specific, tutors could potentially come from anywhere, making a messaging system the primary method of communication.

There will also be a ‘users’ list, so that users can view people who they know personally, or have worked with before. This list can be updated at any time if users discover tutors they enjoy working with, or want to explore new options recommended by the matching function. By matching users with compatible needs and schedules, Online Office Hours minimizes the time between asking a question and receiving an answer. If a student ever finds that professors’ and teaching assistants’ office hours aren’t enough to find help, Online Office Hours will be a valuable asset for students and tutors.

Project Charter

Schedule