Supplement to Distance Learning: Design for a Remote TA Support System

Usually one or more Teaching Assistants (TAs) are working onsite to help students during discussion sections, during office hours, or with lab assignments. However, in an environment where distance learning is used, an onsite TA might not be available. In this paper we propose a Remote TA Support System to provide anywhere-and-anytime TA assistance. The system provides both the students and the TA with a rich set of interaction options: either synchronous chatting or asynchronous messaging; and either private one-on-one meetings or a many-to-many group discussion. The collaboration methods between students and TAs include text chatting, image annotation, screen/application sharing, presentation and bi-directional audio/video communication. The system also includes an archive server that provides content-on-demand for later reference and evaluation. In this paper we identify the features and requirements of such a system and plan a set of phases to develop the system.