Key Points:

• Effective online teaching requires significantly more time and effort than regular classroom teaching.

• Teaching assistants can both contribute and learn in important ways during various phases of online instruction.

• For smooth execution of online instruction, involve teaching assistants not just in implementation but also during planning and design phase.

• Explore and identify various ways in which TA’s familiarity with the recent technology tools and course content can be harnessed and put to use.

Possible Roles for Teaching Assistants

Based on the nature of the course and also the diverse skills of TAs, there are various possible roles in which TA’s can assist course instructors. Some of the most common one's are listed below.

• Curating content - In online teaching, it is a good strategy to repurpose and use already available content to a large extent than creating it from scratch. TAs can assist in exploring, reviewing and identifying learning resources for curation. Once the resources are identified necessary instructions could be given to TAs to modify them as per the course specific needs.

• Creating and editing videos - Many TAs might come with familiarity of recent technology tools used for video creation and editing. They can assist instructors in choosing tools for making different video formats or video editing .

• Managing online learning platforms - Platforms like Moodle allow adding TAs with permission for editing course pages. This lets TAs to assist instructors in various tasks such as uploading and organizing resources, managing discussion forums or keeping track of student participation.

• Designing and creating formative assessment activities - Online instruction requires us to intersperse many small scale assignments, quizzes or practice activities with customized feedback to ensure learner engagement in asynchronous mode. These activities are usually not meant to score the students but to provide them with opportunities to apply immediately what they have learnt asynchronously. TAs can assist in both designing and creating such activities.

• Conducting live interaction sessions - Conducting live interactions involves many tasks such as scheduling and communicating the session details, creating and managing polls for use during sessions or moderating student questions and responses in chat. These tasks can be taken up by TAs.

Some important pointers on Planning before Video Editing

• No matter whether you are creating or curating video content, both will require video editing. Video editing can be a very time-consuming process. This is because even after recording video with much planning, things change a lot. For instance

• • Particular video planned to be a single chunk turns out to be too lengthy and hence need to be cut into two or more chunks.

  • After recording, you may feel that the topic discussed at the end may fit better if it comes early or somewhere in between.

  • There could be a slip of tongue or speech error while explaining which needs replacement with new audio recording.

  • There could be disagreements with the exact time of transition from instructor narration to presentation slide.

• All this requires arriving at consensus with Instructor/s or fellow TAs even before starting to edit recorded video. For the demo of collaborative video annotation tool which can be used for such purpose please refer the video.

TAs role in Design and Execution of Different Forms of Assessment

TAs can assist in creating different online assessment activities for the course. The following are the possible forms of assessment. The TAs can be assigned the task of creating various activities in the online platforms such as Moodle or BodhiTree.

Role of TAs in Conducting Live Interactions

Occasional live interactions are essential to establish and maintain social connect with the students and conducting them involves multiple tasks which instructor alone cannot handle effectively. TAs can assist Instructors before or during live interactions. Listed below are some possible ways in which TAs can assist.

• Scheduling sessions well in advance and communicating the same with students.

• Setting up polls or quizzes to be conducted during the session e.g. using Mentimeter

• TAs can be moderators during the live interaction to

  • Manage the chat window

  • Help instructor on which doubts need to be taken up for discussion during or after the session

  • Address some of the students questions or clarifications themselves.

• If TA himself or herself is conducting live sessions, then assign a colleague TA as moderator

• TAs can also assist in writing a summary of the key points for those who were unable to join.