# TA Duties

This page summarizes the main activities and tasks of teaching assistants for CSE 6040, the Introduction to Computing for Data Analysis class that is part of Georgia Tech's MS in Analytics program.

## Activities and Tasks

The expected workload is about 10 hours per week, though that can be "bursty" (some weeks with more than that and many with fewer).

- **Monitor Piazza forums and help handle individual student issues.** Depending on the number of TAs, I expect to have daily "shifts" during "extended business hours" (roughly, 9 am to 9 pm), where you only need to be active one day per week. (Plan to log in 3-4 times on your assigned day to answer or log open questions, and follow up on your questions as needed throughout the week.)
- **Participate in a weekly staff meeting** (1 hour in duration)
- **Co-host weekly office hours** (1 hour in duration, in pairs, but not every week depending on the total number of TAs)
- **Evaluate exam problems** -- You'll be asked either to help write or help stress-test/debug an exam problem. There are three exams: Midterms 1 & 2 and the Final.

Most of these tasks can be done asynchronously. We record staff meetings in case anyone has to miss one. The main synchronous activity is helping to conduct office hours for the students. We typically schedule a one-hour time slot on Wednesday or Thursday evenings between 8-10 pm US Eastern Time for office hours.

## Shift schedules

Once the TA staff list settles, we will create "shift assignments" for all TAs, who will get invites to join a Google Calendar. Each TA will have edit permissions so you can negotiate or barter shifts with one another. There will also be a semester-specific events channel (e.g., #sp20events) on the staff Slack, where a Slackbot will post reminders of upcoming shifts.

> _In Fall 2020, we will move to Georgia Tech's instance of Microsoft Teams because it is contractually obligated to comply with FERPA, the federal regulations that protect student privacy._

Here is how the shift scheduling works. First, every day has 2-4 people assigned to it. The shifts are approximately balanced among all the staff, to evenly distribute weekend and office hour assignments, for instance. Sundays, which can see a lot of traffic since it's the day before an assignment is due, has 3 assigned people; most other days have 2. (For Fall 2019 and Spring 2020, there were 4 on Thursdays because of office hours; see below.)

On your assigned day, you should check on the Piazza forums and help answer questions, especially those where another staff member has not yet chimed in.

To help track issues, we will use GitHub's Issue Tracker. If you see that a question remains unanswered for a while and you don't know how to answer it yourself, create a new issue on GitHub and assign it to everyone on your shift. If necessary, you can elevate it to the head TA and the course instructors.

If your shift falls on an office hours day, then you actually have to do double-duty, both monitoring Piazza and handling an office hour. You can coordinate among yourselves as to who does what. Since we typically schedule the OMSA and VMM office hours to occur on the same day and time, there are four people assigned to that day, two of whom should do the OMSA hour and two who should do the VMM hour. All four should help monitor Piazza on that day.