Leads: Izzy Ford, Lizzie Abouchar

Purpose

The structure of COMP110 has significantly evolved for the Fall of 2020. The introduction of houses, which is an outgrowth of the old "My UTA Team", leads to interesting new opportunities to arrange for students to work more closely with their house heads.

Overview

• 3x a week

  • 2x a week for houses with less experience (2-3h each)
  • One night a week (1-2h depending on TA availability) for experienced students, this can be advertised for people who:
  • Have project questions that are maybe more advanced than 110 content
  • Might have questions about problems outside curriculum (ex. Taking concepts from 110 further, major/minor questions,etc.)
  • This wouldn’t be tutoring, it would be more of a problem solving session with experienced TAs

• House Split Details:

  • Less experienced houses: House 0 - House 15
  • Split 8x8 by night, likely based on TA availability (so that students can work with TAs from their houses)
  • More experienced houses: House 16-19
  • We will try to schedule so that at least 1/4 TAs from the house lecture pairs can staff their house’s hour
  • ** Hours are not restrictive, so if students from houses 0-15 have advanced questions they can go to more experienced hours, if students from houses 16-19 are struggling they can attend tutoring hours **

Scheduling

Dependent on TA availability, but here is a tentative plan.

• 6-8pm Tu & Th → 3/4 hours of this for beginner students, one will be chosen as advanced hour
• 1-2h within daytime on Wednesdays → for beginner students who cannot make a nighttime Tu/Th
• If we want to see if this schedule works for students, we can ask during lecture Zooms for people to “raise hands” if they are not available during any of these times and go from there
• The 1-2h for advanced students will be scheduled based on when most experienced TAs are available/when least amount of TAs are available depending on how that poll works out

Open Questions to Address in this Proposal

1. @KrisJordan: How quickly can we aim to implement? Should we try for this week? We could trade-out some office hours if we wanted to run with it.
2. @KrisJordan: We'll need to flesh out a communication strategy with a little more depth. Here are the key questions students should be able to answer with what we communicate: A) Which tutoring hours are right for me for me to attend? (From our perspective, we need to communicate the two different classifications of tutoring well without it feeling alienating to the majority who are served primarily by the less-experienced hours.) B) How do I know when one of my house TAs is tutoring? (We can use Postem for sharing this info. Ideally it's somewhat constant.) C) Will we just post these hours to Course.Care with general labels?
3. @KrisJordan: How should we track and quantify attendance / use of resource to be sure this is a valuable complement to office hours?