I would guess that if students feel satisfied that their instructor is available and willing to help them–whether that’s in person during office hours or via any of the electronic methods you use regularly–then that’s a decent metric.

I’ll also point out that office hours aren’t just about helping students. Office hours are also a great opportunity to get a sense of how one’s students are doing in the course: What do they understand? What do they now understand? What misconceptions do they have? Are you going to fast? Too slow? This kind of feedback on student learning is very important for meeting students’ learning needs, and office hours (or some online equivalent) is a useful place to gather it.

we have been talking about seat time for kids as well. (highschool) – the more you teach as media and through media – the less productive mere seat time seems to be. so – do we change that up? how lovely would that be?

I don’t know very much about sales (except for being on the receiving end of sales calls), but I have to wonder if there is something out there that tracks sales communications between a rep and potential clients which could also be used (or tweaked) to track instructor/student relations. It

The way I track conversations (outside of email) with my colleagues is by having all of them in one IM system and keeping message histories, but that isn’t always convenient for them, and I would rather feel free to just talk with them wherever. I use Xobni for helping me track and search conversations in email, and it would be great if that were extended to all ways of communicating.

Have you ever looked at evernote? It might have potential because you can grab screenshots, grab websites, grab selected text, grab photos, etc and then tag each of those snippets. It even scans and allows you to search text in photos or screenshots. Plus, it works on and offline.

p.s. Love the view you have out your window!