Office Hours Overview
Pawtograder’s office hours feature allows students to request live help from course staff. Student requests go into a queue, and multiple staff members can be working concurrently through that queue, assigning themselves to help students as they become available.
Students are encouraged to make public requests for help, so that other students can also benefit from the discussion.
Office Hours Queues
Instructors can create multiple office hours queues to provide different types of help. For example, if a class is coordinated across multiple campuses, there may be in-person help queues per-campus, and a cross-network virtual help queue.
Queue Configuration
When configuring queues, you can:
- Set demo queues for testing and training purposes
- Configure ordinal-based queue ordering to control display order
- Add a course-level Office Hours description to provide context to students
- Define weekly queue schedules that display with live “Happening now” highlights
Students can view the queue schedule through the Get Help button, which provides a persistent call-to-action throughout the site.
Help Request Templates
Instructors can create help request templates, which are pre-filled help requests that students can use to request help. This is useful to help prompt students to ensure that they have completed any expected troubleshooting steps before seeking help.
Templates include:
- A template name (e.g., “General help request”)
- A description explaining what information students should provide
- Pre-filled placeholder text guiding students to include relevant details
Pinned Discussion Topics
When students create a new help request and your course has pinned discussion posts, the system automatically displays a “Before you request help…” section with pinned discussion topics from the course discussion board. This feature:
- Encourages students to check existing answers before joining the queue
- Surfaces instructor-highlighted posts that address common questions
- Shows related posts with an expandable “Show All Related Posts” option
- Reduces wait times by helping students find answers independently
Pin important FAQ threads and common troubleshooting posts on your discussion board to automatically surface them to students before they request help.
Providing Help
When a staff member is working on the queue, they should click Start Working to indicate that they are available to help. This is a helpful indicator for students, and also allows instructors to see that staff are logged on and ready to help.
Select a help request from the queue, and click Take Assignment to indicate that you are actively working on it.
Text and Video Chat
Staff can communicate with students through:
- Text Chat: Built-in messaging for quick questions and code sharing
- Video Chat: Click Start Video Chat to open a video call with screen-sharing capabilities
After the staff member has started the video chat, students can click the Join Video Chat button to join. The video chat window opens in a popup.
When a student has an active help request, it follows them around the site. They’ll see:
- Their current queue position or status
- Notifications when staff assigns to help them
- Video call invitations with a prominent “Join Video Call” button
This ensures students never miss updates, even while browsing the discussion board or other course pages.
Resolving Requests
A help request can be marked as “Resolved” by either a staff member or a student.
AI Assistance for Instructors
Pawtograder provides AI assistance tools to help instructors and TAs support students more effectively. An AI Help button appears in help request chats and discussion threads, allowing staff to generate context that can be used with AI assistants.
Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server
The MCP server enables AI assistants to access course data securely:
- Authentication: Uses Supabase OAuth (instructors and graders only)
- Available Tools: Fetch help requests, discussion threads, submissions, test results, and build output
- Privacy Protection: Never exposes sensitive user data
- Assignment Context: Add a
handout_url to assignments to provide assignment context to AI assistants
This feature helps TAs quickly understand student errors and provide more effective assistance, especially for complex programming assignment debugging.
Feedback and Analytics
After a help request is completed, the student can provide feedback on the help provided. This feedback is visible to instructors only and can be used to:
- Monitor quality of assistance provided
- Identify areas for improvement
- Recognize excellent staff members
