As a tutor, you want your students to be able to contact you and seek your guidance and support. But how do you achieve that when we are all working remotely in a way that respects work/life boundaries, and protects your privacy and the time you need to focus on the other things you are also being asked to do? Hopefully the following guidance will help.

Establish boundaries and expectations

Boundaries are fundamental to personal tutoring in all sorts of ways, and never more so at at time when the boundaries between home and work, and public and private lives may erode. Take time to think about what your boundaries are regarding student contact, using the following points as a guide.

When do you want to be available for students to contact you? You probably don't want to be available on demand 24/7, so what days and times will you be available to students to contact you?
Will you have defined 'virtual office hours' when you will be available to students who contact you without prior appointment? If so, what will these 'office hours' be?
What are acceptable ways for students to get in contact with you and/or arrange an appointment? (e.g. phone, email, VLE messaging, appointment scheduling system, etc)

Once you've decided on your boundaries, you need to set expectations in your students by clearly communicating these boundaries to them and letting them know when and how they will receive a response from you. You can publish these expectations as an email to all your tutees, on your VLE site, or add them as a standard footer to all your outgoing emails so that they are visible on every message you send to students. At the very least, you will want to tell students when you will be available for contact, and through what means, but in framing your expectations it is sensible to communicate clearly to students the following additional information:

If a student contacts you, how will you respond to them (e.g. telephone, email) and will this vary depending upon how they communicated with you?
If a student contacts you, when can they expect you to reply to them (e.g. 'I will normally respond to email within 2 working days')?
If a student contacts you outside of the the times when you have said you will be available for contact, when can they expect you to respond to them?
What will happen if a student contacts you through some other means than the ones that you have said you will use?
When a student contacts you for guidance or support, how can they expect you to respond to them? (e.g. 'I will reply to you via email arranging a date and time for a telephone or video call in which we can discuss your queries'). If you will offer the student a choice in how you will engage with them (e.g. choice of video call, or phone call) you should tell them this and let them know how they can express their preference.
If you are getting common queries from your students, it may be useful to compile answers to frequently asked questions (FAQ's) which you (or your institution) can share via your VLE site or similar. In your response to students contacting you, you may wish to refer them to the FAQ's as this may help students to resolve their query for themselves (e.g. I will reply to you via email arranging a date and time for a telephone or video call in which we can discuss your queries. In the meantime, you may wish to look at the list of Frequently Asked Questions available at <insert location> as this may have information that is relevant.')
If you have defined 'virtual office hours', make sure that you publish a clear list of these in a readily accessible place for students to see (e.g. on your VLE site(s), or in your email footer)
If students are able to self-book an appointment with you, provide students with details of how they do this, either in your email footer or on your VLE site

The key to providing an effective student experience is in letting students know exactly what they can expect from you and then making sure that you honour those expectations.

Making Yourself Accessible Via Email

Email is a convenient format for contacting people and resolving trivial queries, but for anything else it isn't really the best medium for discussing and resolving student queries. You probably want to limit your use of email to being no more than a means for

allowing your students to request an appointment
communicating appointment arrangements to students
sharing meeting notes and information with students after a meeting

Making Yourself Available Via Telephone

Never under-estimate the accessibility and value of a telephone conversation in supporting a student, but be aware of protecting your own work/life boundaries when working from home and using your own telephone equipment. DON'T publish your personal mobile phone or landline phone number to students as a way of contacting you unless you are happy for them to contact you at any time of day or night both now and in the future. Although setting boundaries and expectations helps, recognise that not all students will stick to the boundaries; if you publish your personal phone numbers you are effectively making yourself available to all of your students all of them time.

It is far better to ensure you enforce your boundaries using one or more of the following methods:

Receiving calls via your campus telephone system

If your campus uses a Voice over IP (VoIP) telephone system, it is likely to offer a telephone answering system which allows callers to leave you a message, and which allows you to retrieve those messages when you are off-campus. Some systems will also email you a recording of messages as soon as they are left. The system may also allow you to arrange for any calls made to your office telephone number are automatically forwarded to another telephone number of your choice (e.g. your personal mobile or landline number). Using these features you could continue using your office phone number to make yourself available to your students. Students can either leave you a message which you can retrieve remotely, or contact you directly by phoning your office number and reaching you on another phone without revealing the details of that phone number. Check with your campus IT services team for full details and guidance of any features of your campus phone system which may help you to work remotely
Note: If you do forward calls from your office phone, you may wish to check whether these feature can be scheduled to operate at certain times (e.g. 9am-5pm on weekdays) otherwise you still run the risk of making yourself available to students at any time.
Withhold your telephone number when calling students

If you have to return student calls from your personal landline or mobile phone, protect your privacy and enforce your boundaries by withholding your phone number. You can do this from a landline phone by dialing 141 before the number you wish to call. On an iPhone, there are several options for withholding your number - see this iPhone guidance for more details. Android phones also enable you to withhold your phone number - see this Android guidance for more details. Note: the ability to withhold your number on a landline or mobile phone might be dependent on the services offered by your provider. If in doubt, check with your provider.

Making Yourself Available Via Videoconferencing

If you intend to offer virtual office hours, you could choose to make yourself available to students on-demand via video conferencing during those times. You could schedule a recurring meeting in your video conferencing application (e.g. Zoom, Google Hangouts, etc) and publish the meeting link for that recurring meeting to your students in the location where you publish your virtual office hours.

If you choose to do this, you should ensure that you connect to the scheduled office hour video meeting using the published link during your office hour(s). But you should ensure that, if a student calls you, you do NOT discuss any student issues, queries or personal information on that call, but simply use it as a means to schedule a second, private video conversation using your video conferencing software. You may do that immediately - and thus leave the office hours call - or at some future date. If you choose to leave the office hours call, any other students who try to contact you won't get a response so ensure that you make it clear in any expectations that you communicate to students that if you aren't on the call when they try to contact you, it is because you are busy dealing with another student and they should try to contact you later.

The reason we suggest this way of working is because if you have published a link for a regular scheduled video call, any student can join this call at will during the scheduled time. If you are on the call chatting to one student, another student can join in and you could unwittingly divulge personal, confidential information to other students if you do not notice them join the call.

If you use the Zoom video conferencing platform you could achieve a much slicker way of operating virtual office hours by publishing a link to a regular scheduled meeting (as above) and combining this with the waiting room feature (this is currently enabled by default by Zoom for all meeting using a personal meeting ID). The waiting room enables a caller to connect to the meeting but they cannot join in on the call until you explicitly authorise them to join in by clicking a button. In this way, you could be chatting with one student and if a second student tries to connect, they will be placed in the waiting room until you let them into the conversation and will see a message informing them that they are in the waiting room (you may even be able to customise this message). You can leave them in the waiting room until the first student leaves the meeting, then you can let the second student join. In this way you can ensure that you only ever have one student in a meeting at any one time, thus enabling you to use the meeting for confidential student discussions.