Experience Report: Meet the Professor - A Large-Course Intervention for Increasing Rapport

In a large CS class, it's likely that most students will never speak with the instructor. This presents challenges in terms of student engagement. As class time is limited for building rapport, out-of-class interventions are recommended, such as meeting with students in small groups to discuss non-class topics. If an instructor is to meet with all the students, how can the benefits be maximized while mitigating impacts on the instructor's time and students' access to help? What should be discussed? And how beneficial are such meetings, given that they will have to be short? This paper introduces Meet the Professor (MTP), a course element designed with these issues in mind. MTP was deployed in three sections of an upper-division course at UC San Diego. In end-of-course surveys, students broadly reported increases to rapport, most notably finding instructors to be more approachable than they previously thought. Overwhelmingly, students reported appreciation for meeting with the instructor and did not find that MTP interfered with other learning opportunities. Recommendations are provided for managing the instructor's time and maximizing the value of the intervention.