Edx: The TA Experience

1. Edx: The TA Experience by Noam Angrist and Ting Mao

2. The role of TAs in digital classrooms • Managing Forums • Analyzing weekly student performance data • Running weekly OH via live Skype chat • Posting guidelines (HW policy, Grading policy, etc.) • Identifying weekly hot topics and questions and soliciting responses from Professors

3. Managing Forums Current Strengths • Tags on staff and Community TA posters • Liking capabilities by staff and community • Good space for students to interact with each other and ask questions • Good permissions for staff to edit/remove irrelevant posts Room for Improvement • Too much traffic • Searching by author/user • Categories and cleaning up posts • A protocol for updates that all students will see (e-mail, forum, etc) Best Practices We Learned • Community TAs • Use MIT (in-class students to help moderate) • Pinning feature

4. Managing Forums

5. Analyzing Weekly Data Current Strengths • Progress bars for students which track real-time progress • Weighting capabilities of each question Room for Improvement • data downloading capabilities for TA's directly from the website • point breakdown of questions in the data • A userface on edX which could calculate (for Profs to evaluate learning and set grade cutoffs): • average HW, FE accuracy per unit & standard deviations • average overall accuracy & standard deviations • average accuracy by questions, disaggregated by HW and FE Best Practices We Learned • Excel files sent by Allison at edX with student performance per question, Noam used STATA to calculate the above information

6. Analyzing Weekly Data

7. Weekly OH Current Format • Select 8 students based on their submission of questions to participate • Skype OH in alternate times to accommodate time zone differences • Office hour summaries and transcripts are uploaded immedidately after the office hours Current Strength • Personal interactions with students help them learn faster • The selected questions are higher-quality compared to average questions in the forum • Office hour transcripts are very useful supplementary learning materials Room for Improvement • The enthusiasm faded slowly as the semester goes. • Additional group office hours are suggested by the students

8. Creating Guidelines Current guidelines: • Homework guidelines • Community TA guidelines • Office Hour guidelines Room for improvement: • The guidelines can be uploaded at the beginning of the course to avoid confusion • Everything needs to be very explicitly explained

9. Weekly Hot Topics Current format: • TAs select popular questions from the forum and send them to the professors on a weekly basis • The answers are compiled and uploaded, and are also replied to the forum questions directly Strength: • The professor's responses are well received by the students; the direct interaction with the professors is also very encouraging

10. Conclusions • Forums are enormous beasts. We need more organized forums for cleaner interaction and better systems (i.e. Community TAs) • Forums/edX needs a central location or well-defined protocal to disseminate information to all 40,000+ students and ensure they see it. • Office Hour Transcripts might be more effective than live OH. • edX should implement a user-friendly data analysis system for TA's and professor to evaluate student learning in real time and set grade cut offs (students ask right away). • edX or TA should collaborate to find out the weeks' "hot topics" without needed to scan through an elaborate and huge forum (like Twitter key word searches, or Facebook tags)