Teaching assistant

A teaching assistant or teacher's aide (TA) or education assistant (EA) or team teacher (TT) is an individual who assists a teacher with instructional responsibilities. TAs include graduate teaching assistants (GTAs), who are graduate students; undergraduate teaching assistants (UTAs), who are undergraduate students; secondary school TAs, who are either high school students or adults; and elementary school TAs, who are adults (also known as paraprofessional educators or teacher's aides). By definition, TAs assist with classes, but many graduate students serve as the sole instructor for one or more classes each semester as a teaching fellow or graduate student instructor, although in some states, such as Florida, they are called "teaching assistants". Graduate and adult TAs generally have a fixed salary determined by each contract period (usually a semester or an academic year); however, undergraduates and high school students are sometimes unpaid and in the US and other countries wi

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Student

A student is a person enrolled in a school or other educational institution. In the United Kingdom and most commonwealth countries, a "student" attends a secondary school or higher (e.g., college or

Undergraduate education

Undergraduate education is education conducted after secondary education and before postgraduate education. It typically includes all postsecondary programs up to the level of a bachelor's degree. F

Lecture

A lecture (from lēctūra ) is an oral presentation intended to present information or teach people about a particular subject, for example by a university or college teacher. Lectures are used to c

Iterative Classroom Teaching

Thibault Lucien Christian Asselborn, Volkan Cevher, Pierre Dillenbourg, Louis Pierre Faucon, Arpit Merchant, Shuqing Teresa Yeo

We consider the machine teaching problem in a classroom-like setting wherein the teacher has to deliver the same examples to a diverse group of students. Their diversity stems from differences in their initial internal states as well as their learning rates. We prove that a teacher with full knowledge about the learning dynamics of the students can teach a target concept to the entire classroom using O (min {d, N} log 1/epsilon) examples, where d is the ambient dimension of the problem, N is the number of learners, and epsilon is the accuracy parameter. We show the robustness of our teaching strategy when the teacher has limited knowledge of the learners' internal dynamics as provided by a noisy oracle. Further, we study the trade-off between the learners' workload and the teacher's cost in teaching the target concept. Our experiments validate our theoretical results and suggest that appropriately partitioning the classroom into homogenous groups provides a balance between these two objectives.

ASSOC ADVANCEMENT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Distributed Awareness for Class Orchestration

Pierre Dillenbourg, Frédéric Kaplan, Hamed Seiied Alavi

The orchestration process consists of managing classroom interactions at multiple levels: individual activities, teamwork and class-wide sessions. We study the process of orchestration in recitation sections, i.e. when Students work on their assignments individually or in small groups with the presence of: teaching assistants who give help on demand. Our empirical study revealed that recitation sections suffer from inefficient orchestration. Too much attention is devoted to the management of the relationship between Students and teaching assistants, which prevent both sides from concentrating on their mail) task. We present a model of students' activities during recitation sections that emphasize the issue Of Mutual awareness, i.e. monitoring help needs and TA's availability. To tackle these difficulties, we developed two awareness tools. Both tools convey the same information: which exercise each group is working on, whether it has asked for help and for how long. In the centralized version, named Shelf, students provide information with a personal response system and the Status Of each team is juxtaposed on a central display. In the distributed version, named Lantern, each team provides information by interacting with a lamp placed oil its table. The display is distributed over the classroom, the information being spatially associated to each group. We are now comparing these two versions ill an empirical study with two first year undergraduate classes in Physics. Preliminary results show that both versions increase the efficiency of interaction between students and teaching assistants. This contribution focused on the distributed version.

Springer-Verlag New York, Ms Ingrid Cunningham, 175 Fifth Ave, New York, Ny 10010 Usa2009

Distributed Awareness for Class Orchestration

Pierre Dillenbourg, Frédéric Kaplan, Hamed Seiied Alavi

The orchestration process consists of managing classroom interactions at multiple levels: individual activities, teamwork and class-wide sessions. We study the process of orchestration in recitation sections, i.e. when students work on their assignments individually or in small groups with the presence of teaching assistants who give help on demand. Our empirical study revealed that recitation sections suffer from inefficient orchestration. Too much attention is devoted to the management of the relationship between students and teaching assistants, which prevent both sides from concentrating on their main task. We present a model of students’ activities during recitation sections that emphasize the issue of mutual awareness, i.e. monitoring help needs and TA's availability. To tackle these difficulties, we developed two awareness tools. Both tools convey the same information: which exercise each group is working on, whether it has asked for help and for how long. In the centralized version, named Shelf, students provide information with a personal response system and the status of each team is juxtaposed on a central display. In the distributed version, named Lantern, each team provides information by interacting with a lamp placed on its table. The display is distributed over the classroom, the information being spatially associated to each group. We are now comparing these two versions in an empirical study with two first year undergraduate classes in Physics. Preliminary results show that both versions increase the efficiency of interaction between students and teaching assistants. This contribution focused on the distributed version.

Springer2009

CS-486: Interaction design

This course focuses on goal-directed design and interaction design, two subjects treated in depth in the Cooper book (see reference below). To practice these two methods, we propose a design challenge, which is further divided into mini-projects evenly spaced throughout the semester.

ENV-167: Introduction to environmental engineering

This introduction to Enviromental Engineering is meant to show the students how upcoming courses in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and other areas will be used to gain a scientific understanding of environmental problems and then help to solve them.

MATH-325: Dynamics and bifurcation

Introduction to local and global behavior of nonlinear dynamical systems arising from maps and ordinary differential equations. Theoretical and computational aspects studied.