Consultation hours help to signal availability and responsiveness to learners. You can distinguish between open online consultation hours and individual appointments. Open consultation hours explicitly serve to clarify content-related questions and anyone can drop by without registering. Individual appointments, on the other hand, can be booked individually.

A drop-out time directly after the online session can also serve as an open consultation hour to clarify questions regarding content. At this point, students have "warmed up" and then often have different, more deeper  or individual questions than at the beginning of the session, where they were still settling in.

If questions arise during drop-out time or open office hours that are of interest to all students, you can communicate them in the forum or take them up in the next session. Here, you can also engage the questioner directly by having him or her take over the forum posting or by reminding them of the question in the next session. This way, you show appreciation for your students' questions and create a space in which they feel comfortable asking their questions.

To promote student exchange, why not focus on the collaborative and communicative design of self-study phases? These are used for students to prepare or follow up synchronous sessions.

Preparation tasks often involves familiarizing oneself with a new topic, e.g. with the help of a learning video or by reading scientific texts. The mountains of knowledge to be mastered may seem insurmountable for some students, either due to the sheer mass of texts and videos or also due to difficulties in understanding.

• When it comes to clarifying unanswered questions, an open online consultation can be an appropriate service.
• But when it comes to feeling overwhelmed, sometimes it's just helpful to exchange with each other and reassure yourself that others are feeling the same way you are. As a lecturer, point out the possibility of creating your own groups in learning platforms such as Stud.IP and communicating there via chat or forum. It is important to point out that you have no insight into these study groups.

Follow-up tasks can also be used well to strengthen the learning community.
For example:

1. collaboratively writing a summary of the session as a blog post,
2. working on an exercise in partner or group work, or
3. collaboratively creating a wiki or glossary for the course, in which topics can be deepened or summarized.

Depending on the type of exam (written papers, exercises, tests, ...), the contact to and between the students between the synchronous meetings can be established in different ways.

• In case of an exam it makes sense to offer self-tests already during the lecture period, so that the students get (automatic) feedback on their learning status. In addition, it is useful to to offer open online consultation hours to discuss the questions and answers of the self-test.
• In the case of written assignments (homework, essays, etc.), "writing groups" can be set up in which students can give each other peer feedback.
• For exercises, learning tandems can be formed to work on and submit assignments together.
• In the case of oral presentations or video presentations, it is advisable to explain the available software in an online consultation hour and to offer a joint test run.

You could invite your students with some distance to the course to an open exchange about the course (what was particularly good, what was not so well received, what would the students still wish for, how does the course fit into their study program, etc.). Such an event can also serve as a review of the course evaluation.