Feature Request: show how many instructors are online

[myounus99]

Can you display the number of instructors that are online at the top of the screen? Students in EECS 485 have been asking for this feature so they know if the queue is being serviced, especially to see whether instructors are staying late to clear out the queue even after its closed.

[CarsonHoffman]

I had considered such a feature when adding the view of connections to the queue, and would be able to do this fairly easily from a technical perspective, but I do have some privacy and usability concerns:

1. Quite simply: as an instructor, I'm not sure I'd want to have this information available to students without some sort of manual opt-out, as scheduling information for some courses is intentionally not public, but:
2. Having manual interaction in the system somewhat goes against the scheduled nature of the queue, i.e. if the queue closes automatically it feels unintuitive to need to manually opt-out of this display, and is something to forget.
3. There are regularly 20+ connections to the queue left on overnight (just an example: at 2 AM Eastern this morning there were 17 connections); I imagine that at least some of these are course staff, and might lead to some additional stress on students expecting help as well as staff having to deal with the aftermath.

Overall, while this seems feasible technically, I'm not 100% sure if this is a great UX move—at least with the picture I have in my head. Do you have any thoughts from an instructor's perspective on how an ideal system might work for you?

[seshrs]

Regarding point 3: It should be possible to detect inactivity on the page. If an instructor has not moved their mouse or pressed a key on the page for, say, 10 minutes, the instructor can be marked as "inactive".

I don't have enough context about points 1 and 2, but I would imagine that it could be nice for students to know that instructors are still actively viewing the queue page. It could also reduce confusion if an instructor is late for OH or if the OH calendar/schedule wasn't updated correctly.

[myounus99]

Last semester I found it really helpful to see how many other instructors were servicing the queue at the same time as me, especially if there are 20+ students waiting to be helped. If I know there's other instructors online I might give each student more than 10 minutes to ask their questions. Additionally, my internet has dropped in the middle of OH before and although I made a piazza post about it there were still students who weren't able to see that I went offline and were waiting.

That being said, I see how this could get confusing with the active connections feature and adding inactivity detection might help like Sesh said.

[developStorm]

As an IA, I'm actually eager for this feature to be extended to student requests - it would be helpful to include the time of their last communication with server on each student's request. We often get students who have been waiting in the queue for hours and have no way of knowing if they are still waiting or have left.

[CarsonHoffman]

@developStorm I've implemented this in 1d47083. Let me know if you have any feedback!

[developStorm]

@CarsonHoffman Thanks that commit looks nice! Just a tiny UI thing here: when the window width goes narrow, it would be more useful to show the online indicator for students on queue instead of on stack...🤔