Teacher Assistant Role LMS Recognition, Rights within FeedbackFruits and FAQ

The Teaching Assistant (TA) role is a newly recognized user role within our tool suite. This role is designed to provide specific rights and responsibilities to staff members who assist teachers in an educational institution.

The introduction of the Teaching Assistant role offers the following benefits:

• Accuracy and Consistency: It provides more accurate and consistent role rights and workflow for staff members who serve as TAs within their institution's LMS.
• Role Alignment: This role aligns with the expectations and functions of Teaching Assistants in educational institutions, ensuring that their actions are in line with their roles.
• Enhanced User Experience: Users, particularly Teaching Assistants, will have a more intuitive and productive experience as their rights and responsibilities match their roles within the institution.

Teacher Assistant Role Rights and Limitations

Rights of Teaching Assistants (TAs) within FeedbackFruits:

Monitoring Activities: TAs can monitor all FeedbackFruits activities, in all tools, and track student progress within them.

Rating and Commenting: TAs can rate and comment on student submissions, skills, and feedback within Assignment Tools (Peer Review, Group Member Evaluation, Assignment Review, Skill Review, Self-Assessment of Skills and Self-Assessment of Work).

Participation in Student Discussions: TAs can view and participate in student discussions in Interactive/Discussion Tools (Interactive Study Materials, Discussion of Work, Discussion of Topic, Comprehension, Interactive Presentation, Team Based Learning).

Grade Adjustments: TAs have the ability to make grade adjustments in the Grading module.

Personal Deadline Extensions: TAs can grant personal deadline extensions to students.

Access to Student Submissions: TAs can download student submissions and feedback reports.

Limitations of Teaching Assistants (TAs) within FeedbackFruits:

Activity Creation and Editing: TAs cannot create or edit activities. They do not have access to the Edit mode for activities.

Publishing Feedback and Grades: TAs cannot publish feedback or grades. These actions are reserved for teachers, including Learning Designers.

Group, Deadlines and Time Windows Editing: TAs do not have the ability to edit groups, deadlines or time windows for activities.

Availability and How the Teaching Assistant Role is Recognized within the LMS

From December 2023, all institutions new to FeedbackFruits will have this role turned on automatically. For already existing FeedbackFruits users, this functionality will be opt-in. If you wish to benefit from the TA role, please follow these steps:

1. Inform your FeedbackFruits contact person so they can provide you with more information about the role.
2. Important: make sure that the role mapping within your institution's LMS is accurate, so the right users get the right role recognition. LMS role criteria:
   1. Blackboard: LTI Admins can decide which LMS role translates to which LTI role
   2. Brightspace: LTI Admins can decide which LMS role translates to which LTI role
   3. Canvas: supports the standard LMS roles mentioned in the table below
   4. Moodle: This LMS does not support teaching assistant (TA) role in LTI, this means that TAs will be classified as students rather than teachers.
3. Get back to your FeedbackFruits contact person, so they can enable it for your entire institution from the FeedbackFruits' Admin side.

Once enabled, all users with a "Teaching Assistant" or "Observer" role within a course the institution’s LMS, will have the FeedbackFruits TA rights. Please note that the feature would only depending on which role they have in a specific course.

Example: Maria works and studies at Sample University

• Maria is a Teacher for a Communications Course
• Besides, Maria is also studying a Spanish Course as a student
• On the side, Maria is also a Teacher Assistant for a Mass Media Ethics Course

Sample University has the FeedbackFruits' ‘Teaching Assistant’ role feature enabled on a institution-wide level.​

In FeedbackFruits Assignments:

• Maria will still be recognized as a Teacher for her Communications Course
• Maria will still be recognized as a Student for her Spanish Course
• However, Maria will now be recognized a Teacher Assistant for the Mass Media Ethics Course

LMS Role Recognition

These are the most frequent LMS roles, how we currently recognize them, and how we will recognize them after this feature is enabled:

Rights Customization and Roles Roadmap

Currently there are no customization options for the TA role rights. The role functionality is the same for all institutions across all different LMSs.

Our current roadmap does not contemplate expanding our role recognition offering for now, besides the Teacher, Student and Teaching Assistant roles.

FAQ Role Recognition

Q: Can TAs sync groups and assignments?

A: Yes, are able to trigger the sync when entering the assignment.

Q: Can TAs switch the activity author?

A: No, this isn’t a possibility now, for any role.

Q: What happens when a person is a TA in one course, but then a student or a different role in another course? What is the hierarchy?

A: This is no problem at all, roles are always per course, just like how you can already be student in one course and teacher in another currently.

Q: In our institution, the Observer role is seen as a role below TAs, thus, read-only. They wouldn’t be able to change grades, nor provide qualitative and quantitative feedback to students. What happens with these individuals?

A: At the moment we do not support a view-only role, since the TA role can also actively engage with students. We recommend either providing a Student role to those individuals, or keeping their TA role but reminding them to not engage nor interact within the activity and just observe.

Q: We have TAs that actually have a Learning Designer role, they are the ones building the activity, but they don’t really review. What happens with these individuals?

A: These users should be mapped out as Teachers within the LMS course, so FeedbackFruits continues to grant them the activity creation and editing rights.

Q: What happens when a TA leaves the activity?

A: Their activity within the activity (ratings and comments) would remain intact. Same behavior as if a teacher left an assignment right now.