Using A Website And Wiki As A Support Tool For Teaching Assistants

Employing students as teaching assistants (TAs) in laboratory sections of large courses reduces faculty’s teaching commitments and provides valuable teaching experience for future faculty. However, it also presents challenges, such as inexperienced TAs and high turnover between semesters. New tools are needed to ensure high quality of lab instruction, consistent across all sections of a large course, as well as from one semester to the next. We have studied the effectiveness of one such tool, a website created to support TAs who teach laboratory sections of two large introductory electrical engineering (EE) courses. Our findings suggest high effectiveness of the website as a repository of established reference information, which is extremely helpful for beginning instructors because it allows them to learn the lab procedures, foresee student questions, and consistently grade lab reports. At the same time, we have found a reluctance of TAs to use the wiki component by editing or adding information to it. Focus groups have revealed the causes of this reluctance, which we discuss in this report.