How can I use Canvas for TA coordination?

Dear Aggie,

A colleague has a non-academic course that they somehow use with their Teaching Assistants (TAs). Do you know anything about this and how I could use it to provide training and build community in my lab course with many sections and many TAs?

~Looking for TA Coordination

Dear Looking,

I hear you about trying to coordinate large courses with lots of sections and lots of TAs. You often need a central repository for handouts, answer keys, protocols etc. And because you may not want students to have access to those materials, you may want to keep them separate from your course. There are many options: Dropbox, Google Drive, Teams, etc. But, if you are delivering at least a part of your course through Canvas, why not use the same platform for your TAs?

A great option to keep everything in Canvas, but to keep everything away from your course students is to set up a non-academic Canvas course. This is a Canvas course shell that is not associated with an academic course, but to which you can add people (as students or TAs) and publish. In my case, I use a non-academic course for my lecture course TAs and undergraduate peer facilitators. I add them all as TAs, and then set up modules that parallel the course for which they are TAing.

Each module has answer keys and teaching notes for them to access. We have weekly prep meetings on Zoom, which can be recorded for them to view through the Zoom link if needed.

While I haven't done this (yet), I could see setting up discussion boards for them to post questions or challenges that they encountered in their teaching, and to get feedback from their peers as well as the instructors. You could also develop this type of course as a collaborative teaching and learning environment, in which TAs/peer facilitators can share ideas for handling the course material each week, or share articles or on-line posts relevant to the course. And because everyone knows how to access Canvas, it is easy for everyone to access and to find the materials that they need each week.

If you would like to try this approach, you can request a non-academic course here:

https://inside.nmsu.edu/learning/request-forms/request-form-non-academic-course/

I hope that this gives you a potentially useful approach for organizing materials and a providing a collaboration space for your TAs.

~Aggie