Tasq

Teaching Assistant Scheduler & Question-Solver
Team AMMMP
Group E3
Alan Herman | Matthew Hsieh | Montserrat Lobos | Minnar Xie | Paul Kim

Intro Problem Solution + & - Conclusion
Context
● Office hours and not recitations or class
● Observed TAs from both code-intensive
classes and classes that were systems design
● Mixed experience levels among TAs

Issues Observed
TA office hours are either
really packed or really empty
Empty: TA wastes time and does not work on tasks for office hours
Packed: TA is extremely busy and does not help all students efficiently

Issues Observed
TA answers the same question multiple times

Issues Observed
When the TA doesn’t know the answer to a
question, he spends a lot of time searching
through external resources
Wastes the time of TA, Student, and other students who are waiting

Time is not efficiently used
● Not enough TAs relative to students so TAs need to be efficient with time
● TAs aren’t prepared for office hours
Systemic Issues

Systemic Issues
● There is no structure to share TA knowledge
from semester to semester
○ No required/built-in training
○ No repository for questions and answers

Proposed Solution
(Teaching Assistant Scheduler & Question-Solver)

Proposed Solution
Aggregates student
questions before
office hours
Dynamically schedules
students with the same
problem for the same
time slot
Builds a central
repository for Q&A for
all TAs, students, and
future semesters

Student 1 has a question.

Student 1 uses TASQ to submit his question to his TA

TASQ aggregates students’ question and groups them

TASQ allows TAs to see if students have submitted any questions

TASQ has grouped
similar students’
questions together
that allows the TA to
send immediate
feedback.
If the TA cannot
provide an
immediate answer,
he will select a time
slot that works for
both students and
schedule a time slot
during his office
hour.

Student 1 is alerted when he gets a response from a TA to his question

Student 1 confirms his appointment to the TA.

The TA views his office hour appointment schedule before the office hour.

TASQ allows the TA to prepare for upcoming questions.

During the office hour.

TA looks at his schedule and notices that Group 1 is the first group in the queue.

TA helps students in Group 1.

TA then moves on to help the next group of students.

TA helps students in group 2.

Students get the help they need in efficient manner, and they are happy.

Design Features
Time for each office hour is adapted to
best fit the students’ needs.

Design Features
Notifications will be sent to other TAs if
office hours will be very busy

Design Features
TAs can save time explaining the same
thing to multiple students because the
system automatically matches time
slots for students with the same
problem

Design Features
TAs can answer the questions of
students on the application, saving
time at office hours
Students can view answered questions
in a repository

Benefits of TASQ
TAs can prep questions before office hours
allowing for more efficient time use

Benefits of TASQ
Helps prevent TAs from having to explain
solutions for the same problem over and over

Benefits of TASQ
System allows TAs to keep track of what has
been asked and answered

Benefits of TASQ
Allows TAs to predict attendance flow

Potential Problems
● The success of the application depends on TAs
managing the questions and answers
● TAs having to spend more time outside of office hours

Holes
● Walk-ins vs. appointments
● Last minute questions are inevitable.
● Planning ahead: How early?
○ Can issues can be properly described in questions?
● TAs on-call availability?

Conclusion
Improve Attendance
flow
Reduce Redundancy
Efficient use of
external resources Reuse Knowledge

Conclusion
This is an iterative design process

This presentation was created with Google Drive,
You may see the original at :
https://docs.google.
com/presentation/d/1ZS6RCGuJf0MbwjtuUGqGHbCTdIXqxr_mHlVkdOVB
ycE/edit?usp=sharing

Tasq

More Related Content

What's hot

Viewers also liked

Similar to Tasq

Recently uploaded

Tasq