Just as online learning may allow students to attend from anywhere, so also it means teaching teams may operate from anywhere. In this session, we will discuss challenges and opportunities to managing teams of remote graders and teaching assistants.
This semester, I am teaching four online classes, with a total enrollment of over 1300 students. To support these students, I have 48 total teaching assistants: four teams of 12 people each. These students work from all over the United States, in addition to taking their own classes, having their own day jobs, and having families. There's no way to arrange regular synchronous meetings with this number of busy individuals.
Given distributed teams like these, how do you manage intergrader reliability? How do you allocate work? How do you come to a shared understanding of student misconceptions and challenges in order to address them? How do you ensure students in large classes get their questions answered by large teaching teams? These are all among the new difficulties that arise when attempting to teach a large class online with a large team of teaching assistants: the traditional mechanisms of weekly meetings, regular in-person office hours, and grading parties do not work.
In this session, we will discuss solutions to some of these issues. For example, modern networking and communication systems like Slack can play a strong role in keeping teaching teams in more constant contact than more heavyweight email-based workflows, but they also risk over-emphasizing the views of more active individuals. Collaborative suites of tools may allow for easier distribution of grading responsibilities, but they do not inherently ensure that graders are consistent. At the same time, large distributed teams of teaching assistants may be able to offer more coverage for answering questions quickly, or unique perspectives based on their professional backgrounds. Additionally, online teaching assistants may be continually available after graduation, limiting turnover and allowing them to take on greater responsibilities.
This session builds on my work in researching the motivations of the large team of teaching assistants in Georgia Tech's online Master of Science in Computer Science program, which this term has over 250 teaching assistants. Many of these are alumni of the program, and our research has shown that they are differently motivated than traditional on-campus teaching assistants.