Author: Christine King
Christine King is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Contact: kingce@uci.edu
What is a learning assistant?
The Certified Learning Assistants Program (CLAP) is a peer facilitation program designed to increase student learning through in-class support by undergraduate near-peers. Learning assistants are able to improve content knowledge of students and themselves beyond teaching assistants or lab assistants, as they receive pedagogical training to effectively facilitate active learning in a variety of classroom settings – lectures, discussions, labs, and recently, Zoom. They make classrooms become more collaborative, student-centered, and interactive by reducing instructional team to student ratios. They provide instructors with assistance in reflection of the course and student learning through collaborative interaction during weekly planning sessions among instructors and teaching assistants. An overview of the types of learning assistant activities and responsibilities is outlined in Figure 1.
Figure 1:
Overview of the activities and responsibilities: practice – facilitating interactions with students, content – attending weekly planning meetings with the instructional team, and pedagogy – attendance of a pedagogy course in evidence-based instruction and active learning.
How were learning assistants used in engineering courses during in person instruction?
During in-person instruction, learning assistants were utilized in several engineering courses by facilitating active learning activities during lectures, problem-based learning and project-based learning during discussion sections, and experimental procedures and safety in laboratories. For instance, Dr. Botvinick, professor of BME 60A: Engineering Analysis/Design: Data Acquisition, was an early adopter of the learning assistant program since 2018, where he utilized learning assistants to facilitate the hands-on projects that were developed during discussion times. In lecture, he was able to optimize the room layouts (e.g. Anteater Learning Pavilion) using learning assistants by having a learning assistant for each table and team group. Specifically, during in-class activities:
“[Learning Assistants] went from table to table during mini-hackathons where students raced to see who could program the fastest. In discussion sections, the learning assistants walked around from group to group to help on their build projects throughout the course.”
Through use of near-peer facilitation from learning assistants in these environments, Dr. Botvinick found that students have become more confident and engaging in the classroom, particularly during the first few weeks of the course.
How are they being used now during remote instruction?
In an online setting, Dr. Botvinick transferred the learning assistant model into distinct breakout sections in Zoom. He noticed that in the first two discussions, before group projects were started and students were introducing themselves to the software through problem sets, that “students seemed to be more comfortable talking to the learning assistants over me to ask questions. They have been very helpful by serving as a confidence booster or engagement advocate by assisting students with asking questions in the new online format”.
In addition to use of learning assistants in breakout rooms on Zoom, instructors have also utilized learning assistants to guide discussion board posts on Canvas, provide study support on remote software programs such as Slack and Discord, and provide advice by allowing students to use the discussion forum on Canvas to interact with learning assistants during team-based coursework.
So why use Learning Assistants?
Near-peer facilitation from students who are formally trained in active learning pedagogy by UCI instructors will improve engagement and student learning both remotely and in-person. According to Joshua Arimond, Lead Coordinator of the Certified Learning Assistants Program:
“We’re hearing from a lot of professors that they’re feeling the pressure to be super creative and innovative in their remote instruction course design. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to recruit a team of undergraduate Learning Assistants to facilitate productive discussions in breakout rooms, engage students in discussion boards, or foster a more student-centered, remote learning experience.”
The concept of facilitating discussions and learning in a remote setting is even more imperative for undergraduate engineering students, as engineers are very active learners, and require near-peer learning to develop the technical skills required of the field.
For more information:
General Information
Faculty Information
Interested in adopting learning assistants in your classroom? Contact me! The Learning Assistant Faculty Advisor for the Henry Samueli School of Engineering: kingce@uci.edu