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During Your Request

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After Submitting a Request

Your request page shows your position in the queue and whether anyone has picked it up. Until someone does, the assignment status reads “Waiting for a TA/instructor to pick this up”. The chat sits below that, and a sidebar beside it lists the other requests in the same queue.
A student's help request page: a More in office-hours sidebar on the left listing the three open requests in the queue, and on the right Your position in the queue 1, Assignment Status Not Assigned with the note Waiting for a TA/instructor to pick this up, the request header with an Open badge, Resolve and Unwatch buttons and a 2 students expander, and below it the chat transcript with instructor replies on the left and the student's own messages on the right
Staff can start a video call from your request. When they do, a green Video call is active banner appears in the chat with a Join Video Call button. You cannot start a call yourself. If a message fails to send, for example while the chat is reconnecting, your text stays in the box so you can try again.

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Active Help Request Widget

While you have an open request and you are elsewhere on the site, a widget in the bottom-right corner tracks it, showing the status, your queue position, and any unread messages. Expand the widget to chat without leaving the page, or use its buttons to open the full request or resolve it.
Expanded active help request widget floating over a course page: a header row with the request number, the office-hours queue name, an open status badge and buttons to resolve the request, open it in full and minimize the widget, above the chat transcript and a Type a message composer with a Send button

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Help Request Status

Your request has one of four statuses:
  • Open: waiting for a staff member
  • In Progress: a staff member is helping you
  • Resolved: the request is finished
  • Closed: the request was closed
Queue and search lists label requests with the underlying value (open, in_progress, resolved, closed) rather than these display names.

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Notifications

Two separate mechanisms tell you about a help request. In-app notifications arrive in your notification inbox when a staff member is assigned to a request or its status changes. You watch your own request automatically. Use Watch and Unwatch in the request header to stop following yours or to start following a classmate’s public request. Chat messages from other people trigger a desktop notification, a sound, a flashing tab title, and an unread count on the tab favicon. These fire only while you are not looking at the page, so nothing interrupts you when the tab is already in front of you. When you haven’t granted browser notification permission, your request page shows a prompt with an Enable button. Sound, tab-title flashing, and the favicon badge are on by default; you can turn each off, and send yourself a test notification, from Notification Settings in your user menu. See Notifications for the full set of channels.

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See also