Community TAs scale high-touch learning, provide student-staff brokering, and build esprit de corps

Massive online courses introduced Community TAs (CTAs) to help scale teaching staff support. CTAs are former top students who return as volunteer course staff. We studied CTAs in 3 classes on Coursera, including interviews and surveys from a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) class. A key benefit of CTAs is their brokering role that mediates staff and student goals. CTAs provide greater discussion forum coverage (both in quantity and time of day) compared to instructor and Head TA (HTA) capabilities and contribute to peer assessment. As CTAs are new teachers, physically distributed, and culturally diverse, clear division of responsibilities is especially important.