Upcoming Events
Apply for LAs for Spring 2021 - Deadline Oct 28
Oct 28, 2020, 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM
Course proposals are currently being accepted to work with Learning Assistants (LAs) in Spring 2021. LAs are undergraduates who work in College of Science courses to facilitate student learning in a variety of settings. All first-time LAs participate in a weekly pedagogy seminar (which is online this seminar, and will be online again in the spring), and all LAs meet regularly with course faculty to prepare for the upcoming content in the course and discuss how everything is going with the students.v
The deadline for faculty to apply to have LAs in their courses is October 28, 2020. After that, if your proposal is approved (which may be limited based on funding), students will be able to apply directly to your course, and you can interview and select the LAs for your course. (The student application will open on or around November 2, so if you know students who would be great LAs, please encourage them to apply.)
To submit a course proposal, go to https://www.learningassistantalliance.org and click on “LA Campus”. If you already have an account from a previous semester, you can still log in with this account; otherwise you can create a new account. Click on the “Course Proposals” menu in the left column, and click on “Start Course Proposal”. This is an opportunity to think about how LAs can contribute to your course. You’ll also get to write a “job description” for prospective LAs (including the times you’ll need them to be available, so you can make sure to have LAs whose schedules are compatible with your course).
The proposal form has changed this year, to be more flexible and reflect the multitude of formats in which we are now teaching (including online and hybrid). Unfortunately this means that proposals created with the old form can't be directly reused, but it also means that you'll only be asked to answer the questions that are directly relevant to your class.
If you don’t know exactly what you’ll be teaching in the spring, that’s ok. You can fill out the form based on what you think you might be teaching, and if the plans change, we can make adjustments later.
Please share this with any other colleagues (in your department, or elsewhere in COS) who might be interested in working with LAs.
Please feel free to email me at bdreyfu2@gmu.edu , or to reach out to the LA coordinator for your department, if you have any questions.