Apply for Learning Assistants for Spring 2023

The Learning Assistant Program is now accepting course proposals to work with Learning Assistants (LAs) in Spring 2023. 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, 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.   

The deadline for faculty to apply to have LAs in their courses is Monday, October 24, 2022.  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 1, 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 “Spring 2023” menu in the left column, and click on “Start New 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. Please make sure that your recruitment message to prospective LAs includes everything they need to know to make an informed decision about whether to apply to your course, including whether the course is online or face-to-face (or hybrid), and what times they will need to be available.  If you don't know all of this information yet, you can say that too.  More detailed documentation about preparing your proposal in LA Campus can be found here. 

If you previously submitted a proposal for Spring 2021 or later, you should be able to reuse it (and make edits as appropriate).  For earlier semesters, you can still access your old proposals and copy-and-paste whatever text you want to use again.  Please confirm that all the information is still accurate before submitting your proposal (including which components of the course are online vs. face-to-face). 

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 Ben Dreyfus at bdreyfu2@gmu.edu , or to reach out to the LA coordinator for your department, if you have any questions.