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• See T.A. Evaluations by Students for answers to frequently asked questions, including where to obtain sample evaluation forms.
  
  
• Please also review the TA Orientation outline before you begin your TA Assignment.
  
  
• Psychology Course Reserves
  Here are old instructions for placing materials on reserve in the Psychology Library. These instructions will undoubtedbly be different for Fall 2009; we will post them as they become available. Note the early deadlines for materials needed at the start of the term. Contact the professor in charge of the course for which you're TAing to see if your assistance is needed.
  
  

• Multimedia Labs and Classrooms
  Before you begin your TAship in the Psych. Dept., you will need to learn how to operate the equipment in your lab or electronic classroom, and to arrange for training. Please read carefully the online guides to the psychology teaching labs -- 200B and C Schermerhorn -- and schedule a brief training session with Peter Tripp or one of the lab assistants before you use them.
  
  You will also find the online descriptions and instructions for the multimedia classrooms helpful in learning to operate the "epodiums" in 501, 558, or 614 Schermerhorn. If your class will be meeting in one of these rooms, you should complete the online training and schedule a practice session before the start of the term. The equipment changes every year, so even if you have been previously trained, you may need practice.
  
  Macs in all electronic classrooms have been upgraded to OS X. Podium keys are no longer required in 614; users will login to use the epodium. Keys may still be required in 501. For both classrooms, instructors may bring their files on CD, or flash memory, or use file sharing or ftp.
  
• For emergency assistance in 501, 558, or 614 Sch contact:
  

  Phone:	854-3633
  Pager:	via email: erooms-pager@columbia.edu

  
  

  TA Office Hours
  All TAs, graduate students and otherwise, should hold two scheduled office hours per week and should encourage students to attend them. If there is a computer component to your course, i.e., if students will be running extra-credit experiments, preparing PowerPoint presentations, or just using email or accessing course web pages, then you should plan on holding some or all of your TA office hours in a computer-equipped office or lab. The TA Office 318c is available for this purpose.
  
  You may use an online reservation form to request weekly TA Office hours either in 318c or in one of the Psychology Instructional Labs (200b and c). In either case, please provide the course number and your name, as in "Abby W2280 Office Hrs." and indicate that it is a Course Related event. Please read these instructions before requesting time in 200b or c.
  
  
  

  Scheduling Review Sessions
  To reserve 405, first check the current Week-at-a-Glance schedule to find a free time, then contact Winnie McClarin in the dept. office to reserve the room for that time. If you would like to reserve 200b or 200c for a review session, check the calendar to see if a room is free, read instructions for reserving time in classroom labs, and then use the "Add an Event " button on the top right to request a time. Try to choose a time when there are no other activities scheduled there. You may also reserve 614 or 501 Schermerhorn. Please submit your room reservation at least two weeks in advance.
  
  
  

  Course Web Sites
  Every lecture course should have an up-to-date syllabus posted on the web. Some professors prefer to do this themselves, some leave it up to the TA, and some collaborate with the TA in creating and maintaining a course web site. More and more faculty are using CourseWorks for the active day-to-day management of their course site. Web expertise is not required; just ask the prof to add you to the site as a TA. CourseWork FAQs starts with a discussion of how to do that, or you can ask the prof to following the instructions on our own TA Special Privileges page.
  

• Getting starting on the web
• It's a good idea to develop your web publishing skills, even if you don't need them for your current TAship. Here are some tips on getting started:
  
  • Ask one of your web-savvy colleagues for help.
  • Follow Lara's Instructions for creating your first home page in your own cunix directory. Then practice uploading files to that site.
  • If you have the text file that was used to produce a printed syllabus, there are several different ways to produce a web page. For instance, you can use Word's "save as html" or "save as web page" command to automatically turn your text file into a web page.
  • Use Macromedia Dreamweaver, available in 200b/c, to create or edit a web page. Use Dreamweaver's "clean up Word html" command to clean up Word's messy html code.
  • Attend one of the CUIT web-publishing workshops.
  • Read about Web Publishing at Columbia .
  • Use any text editor to add HTML code to your file.
    
• PsychWeb
  Once you're comfortable publishing files and directories in your own cunix site, you can ask Phredd to make you a member of the Psychweb group so that you can publish within the psychology directory. If you do create a course web page you'll need to upload it to the psychology/courses/ directory and request that it be linked to the Course Description, which in turn is linked to the online Directory of Classes. Just send Andrew Johnson the url and he'll take care of the links.
  
  
• Discussion Boards
  Using CourseWorks, it is now quite easy to establish a Web-based bulletin board for your class. Once it has been set up, all students enrolled in the class will automatically be able to read and post messages.
  
  
• Class rosters
  Professors have access to rosters for their classes through SSOL. These rosters are updated daily, and provide student IDs and email addresses. They can be downloaded as tab-delimited text files, and then opened in MS Excel or Word. The CourseWorks roster may lag the Registrar's list by 2-3 days. In the meantime, you may manually add new students to the CourseWorks roster so that they'll have access to the site.
  
  
• Posting grades
  According to University counsel, no portion of a student's social security number may be used in public postings of grades. Rather, you may use either the student's CUID (available via SSOL), or a private code provided by the student. Courseworks has a convenient way of controlling access to posted grades that by-passes these difficulties. If you use no other feature, you might want to consider this one.
  
  
• Please see the Orientation Outline for other practical matters.

   

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