Teaching with Instructional Assistants: Enhancing Student Learning in Online Classes

This article details a pilot project incorporating instructional assistants (IAs), or upper-level undergraduate writing tutors, embedded in the courses of an online writing program at a large land-grant university. The curriculum, called the Writers’ Studio, focused on heavy process and portfolio assessment. Students were asked to create multimodal projects for public audiences in an effort to prepare them to participate as literate citizens beyond higher education. As a result of the multimodal emphasis and process-centered curriculum, the students needed additional instructional support to successfully demonstrate understanding of the learning outcomes for the course. Recognizing that digital writing environments can increase workload, the instructional team had to reconsider ways to manage the instructors’ and students’ needs. The answer was the incorporation of undergraduate teaching assistants, or instructional assistants. In online classes where students write several drafts for each project, instructor feedback on multiple drafts was simply not possible with the number of students assigned to the teacher, no matter how she managed her time. The use of IAs provided what instructors could not: a chance for students to receive feedback on their writing throughout the actual process of writing. Although students still maintained interaction with the instructors, the IAs gave them additional individualized attention. In this article, we provide an in-depth look at the pilot project, including a detailed description of our IA training practices, as well as comments from students about the benefit of the instructional assistants.