T. A. Manual

Practical Matters for TFs and TAs

  • Please review the TA Orientation outline before you begin your TA Assignment.
  • See T.A. Evaluations by Students for sample evaluation forms and for answers to frequently asked questions about evaluations.


  • Psychology Course Reserves
    Faculty may place materials on course reserve using procedures described on the Course Reserves web page. Books will generally be placed on reserve in the Science and Engineering Library of the new Northwest Corner Building. DVDs, videotapes, and other materials are more conveniently placed on reserve in the Geology Library on the 6th floor of Schermerhorn. If you have questions, contact reserves supervisor Jim Crocamo, <jc2120> or 212-854-6769.
  • 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, or another electronic classroom, 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 not required; users will login to use the epodium. Instructors may bring their own laptops or just bring their files on a CD or a flash drive, 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 are expected to hold two scheduled office hours per week and should actively 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.


  • 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 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 a current syllabus posted on the web. Some professors prefer to do this themselves, others collaborate with the TA in creating and maintaining a course web site. Most faculty now use 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 includes 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
  • You may want to develop some web publishing skills, even if you don't need them for your current TAship. Here are some tips on getting started:
    • 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.
  • PsychWeb
    If you're comfortable publishing files and directories in your own cunix site, you can ask Peter Tripp 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 Andres the url and he'll take care of the links.

  • Discussion Boards
    Using CourseWorks, it is now quite easy to establish a Web-based discussion 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 as much as 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.

     
 
 

Last modified by lep1 on August 24, 2011

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