دانلود رایگان مقاله آموزش با دستیاران آموزشی: افزایش یادگیری دانش آموز در کلاس های آنلاین

Abstract

This article details a pilot project incorporating instructional assistants (IAs), or upper-level undergraduate writing tutors, embedded in the courses of an online writing program at a large land-grant university. The curriculum, called the Writers’ Studio, focused on heavy process and portfolio assessment. Students were asked to create multimodal projects for public audiences in an effort to prepare them to participate as literate citizens beyond higher education. As a result of the multimodal emphasis and process-centered curriculum, the students needed additional instructional support to successfully demonstrate understanding of the learning outcomes for the course. Recognizing that digital writing environments can increase workload, the instructional team had to reconsider ways to manage the instructors’ and students’ needs. The answer was the incorporation of undergraduate teaching assistants, or instructional assistants. In online classes where students write several drafts for each project, instructor feedback on multiple drafts was simply not possible with the number of students assigned to the teacher, no matter how she managed her time. The use of IAs provided what instructors could not: a chance for students to receive feedback on their writing throughout the actual process of writing. Although students still maintained interaction with the instructors, the IAs gave them additional individualized attention. In this article, we provide an in-depth look at the pilot project, including a detailed description of our IA training practices, as well as comments from students about the benefit of the instructional assistants.

6. Conclusion

While it may seem that training instructional assistants would make teaching an online course even more laborious for the already overworked instructor, for programs searching for ways to improve their online practices across many courses, the incorporation of IAs can be a useful solution. Only one faculty member, the internship director, taught the practicum course and oversaw the daily work of the IAs; however, the IAs worked in several first-year composition courses and assisted multiple instructors at the same time. Therefore, the workload for the instructors in each course wasn’t increased. Rather, the IAs provided important assistance when managing the responsibility of responding to student drafts and facilitating discussions. Further, the IAs increased the opportunity for students to receive one-on-one attention that could sometimes be diminished in an online classroom. We certainly don’t intend to suggest that teacher-student interaction is sacrificed or that teacher responsibility is somehow transferred to the IAs. The IAs’ participation proved to be an integral part of the Writers’ Studio to supplement teacher interaction, and the first-year composition students recognized the value of the IAs as well. In fact, in the course evaluations, while students made suggestions for improving the course navigation and clarity of specific concepts, students praised the use of IAs and did not have any suggestions for improving the quality of instruction from the IAs. With the right skills and training, IAs can assist the online instructor and improve the overall quality of online education.