Efficient Education without Teaching Assistants

Short-term: Ask PhD-candidates for help

Many PhD-candidates really like to teach and supervise students. They like to exchange experiences, share their passion for the topic and at the same time gain relevant educational experiences for their future career. When appointed at the UT, the regulations state that a PhD can spend max 20 % of their time on education and supervision.

Pay attention to:

When you ask a PhD-candidate, make sure you also talk to their supervisor and promotor and get their approval. When PhD-candidates spend more time on teaching, they have less time for their research. The supervisor has to be aware of this and agree with this. Furthermore, external PhDs (1/3 of all PhDs at the UT) do not have time for education unless when this is part of their own development. So check what kind of PhD they are.

More information:

See the PhD Charter document

Long-term: Students help for ECs

As teacher you know that you yourself learn a lot from teaching and supervising. Therefore helping in teaching and supervising can be a good learning opportunity for the student. As such, you could also give ECs instead of Euros for the educational tasks the student performs. The amount of the tasks should be in line with the amount of ECs the student receives.

Pay attention to:

This idea might be useful for many other teachers as well, so make sure you discuss this with the programme director. And as in any other educational activity, you need to define Learning Objectives for this and find a way how you assess whether the student has learned sufficiently. A short reflection report at the end might be good way to do this.

Long-term: Flipped classroom

If you do not have sufficient time to provide in-depth individual feedback to all your students, you may want to focus the classroom time on application instead of on knowledge transmission. A flipped classroom can be useful here: you ask students to prepare at home (by studying the material, looking at video recordings etc) and in class you will discuss applications or work on cases.

Pay attention to:

This requires some (or more) redesign of your course, so take sufficient time for this redesign. Furthermore you must instruct the students clearly that you expect them preparing for each session and make them feel that this preparation is really necessary for participating in the sessions; if students feel they can participate without preparation they will not prepare. So think carefully about what you will do in class.

More information:

For further support, please contact the following:

• Developing micro lectures: The UT video team 
• Developing multimedia content: Your faculty’s e-Learning specialists  
• Devising a solid blended learning design: CELT Educational Advisers Linlin Pei and Francesca Frittella

Short-term: Create a Canvas forum

Create a Canvas forum so students can ask questions and the students themselves and you can answer the questions. Especially when students respond to each other’s questions they can learn a lot and this will also give you good insights in what they do and do not understand. In the lectures or tutorials you can then pay some more attention to the topics they do not yet fully understand.

Pay attention to:

You need to inform the students how to use the forum and how it can help them in their learning. It is important that you show explicitly that you as well look at the forum, e.g. by answering some questions and/or referring to this in the lectures/tutorials, otherwise the students might experience it as not important. 

Short-term: Use Voice-to-text  tools for feedback

Make a recording of the feedback you want to give to the student and use a tool to let it auto-transcribe. You can do this e.g. with the function ‘Dictate’ in Word. You can then send the written feedback to the student.

Pay attention to:

You still need to check the transcription, as sometime the programmes make a mistakes, especially when you use specific disciplinary language.

More information:

For support on how to use voice-to-text tools, please contact The UT Video-team

Short-term: Group feedback instead of individual feedback

Provide feedback to the whole group of students in class or via Canvas, instead of individual feedback. Try to focus your feedback on the most important topics that the majority of the students struggle with.

Pay attention to:

General feedback has the risk that students will pay less attention to it (thinking ‘that is not for me’). To counteract this effect at least a bit, it helps when you relate the feedback as much as possible to the work of the students, e.g. by giving anonymized examples from the work students handed in. 

Short-term: Peer feedback instead of teacher feedback

Research shows that peer feedback is very helpful in learning, especially the giving of peer feedback. Furthermore, peer feedback is timely and decreases the efforts for teachers or TAs. Organise sessions where students can/should give feedback on the work of their peers. Use clear criteria or a rubric, and let the students indicate tops (what is good) and tips (what can be improved and how) on the work of their peer.

Pay attention to:

Students at first might be resistant to this, indicating that they think it is your job to give feedback. Actually, your job is to make them learn; and giving peer feedback is a very good way to make them learn.

Sometimes students complain about the low quality of the peer feedback received; you might want to check some of this peer feedback, or reevaluate the peer feedback when a student complains about it. Making clear who gave the peer feedback (so names included) might work preventive to low quality peer-feedback.

More information:

See the more detailed description of a Peer Feedback Systematic Method

Short-term: Using Generative AI

When used with caution, generative AI could be used to assist teachers in providing feedback on student homework (work that does not count towards the final grade). Basic generative AI knowledge and skills are required.

Pay attention to:

Online/free-to-use AI tools (e.g. Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini) might not meet with UT’s privacy and security agreements, therefore only use an AI that runs on your own device and use a predefined answer model/assessment rubric. Include as many details and as much context as possible in your prompt. Treat AI output as a starting point, not the final answer and be aware that AI can produce incorrect, unacceptable and/or biased results, so always check before sending the feedback to the student.

More information:

Visit the AI in Eduction in the CELT resource hub

Short-term: Increase clarity in instructions for group work

The more efficient and effective your students work on their project, the less work for you as a supervisor. Creating a clear pathway, defining milestones, indicating deliverables for each key phase of the project, and transparently communicating the desired level of quality for each deliverable are all examples of the components of a clear pathway facilitating student projects. Once the pathway is established, some in-person supervision may be replaced by written feedback with additional in-person meetings available on request. This option may be combined with group supervision (see below).

Pay attention to:

When you will write everything down for the students, they may act by ‘ticking boxes’ and just do what you told them to do and in the end not learn what you want them to learn. So instead of just giving the clarity to the students, help them in getting this clarity themselves, e.g. by giving examples from earlier projects, helping the students in developing a concrete plan + planning at the beginning of their project (= first deliverable) and helping them in defining the quality criteria. 

Short-term: Group supervision instead of individual supervision

Replace some individual supervisory moments with group supervision. This can be both for when you supervise individuals or when you supervise several groups. Each individual or group at the beginning of the meeting pitches their progress, then the other participants/groups give feedback and asks questions.

If needed you can combine these group sessions with individual supervision on demand.

Pay attention to:

Inform your students clearly about the idea of this group supervision session and what is expected of them. At first you may need to chair the meeting, in later meetings students most likely can do that for themselves.

Short-term: Increase instructions before lab work

You might be able to replace TAs' supervision of lab activities with additional instructional support, such as step-by-step guidelines on how to conduct the lab activities for students to use autonomously. You may provide your students with instructions in written or video form, for example, through Canvas. Keep in mind that a lot of valuable resources may be found on the internet, so check there first.

Pay attention to:

All lab sessions should be safe for students who are learning how to execute lab assignments, so only use this suggestion when there is no risk of harm or danger to either the students or the equipment.

Short-term: Use exemplars of lab journals as instruction

When executing a lab assignment, students often follow a step-by-step approach and write a lab journal on their approach and results. You might give the students 2 examples of previous lab journals and let them use these as instruction for their current lab experiment. This way they experience first hand what a lab journal is for. Afterwards they should reflect on what example lab journal helped them best and why, thus distilling the important aspects to be included in a lab journal.

Pay attention to:

Use two different lab journals, one that you think is good and one that you think is of lesser quality. Ask permission of the original authors and remove the names of the authors, so current students can use it anonymously.

More information:

See the Guideline document

Additional tips and suggestions can also be found on the CELT-website on effective and efficient assessment.

Short-term: Oral exams – one examiner and auto-transcription

Use only one assessor instead of two, record the oral exam and if desired use automatic transcription (e.g. the ‘Dictate’ function in Word). This will decrease the amount of assessors needed, and the recording with transcription gives the opportunity to check afterwards in case of doubts, thus increasing reliability.

Pay attention to:

You must inform the students explicitly that the exam will be recorded and how the recording will be stored according to the UT Privacy and Regulations. You probably will have to inform your programme director and Examination Board on this too, so that they know how you will assure good quality of the oral assessment.

Short-term: Written tests – use answer box on answer sheet

Make students write down their answer directly below the question and give only limited space for this in an answer box. That way students are forced to limit their answer to only  the essence, what will decrease the time you need to correct it.

Pay attention to:

Some students have a larger hand-writing, so they will be negatively affected if the answer box is too small. Give instructions on the exam what you expect of the short answer. 

Long-term: Autograding coding assignments

You can use specific software applications to automatically assess coding assignments. The tool CodeGrade is available at UT, it can be integrated with both Canvas and Github.

Pay attention to:

Free-to-use autograding tools that you can find online may not meet with UT’s privacy and security agreements, so please only use the UT-tool CodeGrade.

More information:

See the CodeGrade website

Long-term: Use digital testing instead of written paper testing

Use digital assessment tools like Contest, Remindo, Grasple etc. Depending on the tool used, student answers can be automatically graded, can be used for formative and summative tests, allow for simultaneously correcting by different examiners thus reducing organisational efforts etc.

Pay attention to:

When you want to make use of digital examination, you need to plan this ahead in consultation with the Examination Office. 

Additional information

See the Digital Testing website

Long-term: Change test type

Change the type of test e.g., Multiple Choice questions instead of open ended, written test instead of assignment. The latter formats are often easier to correct thus will save you some time.

Pay attention to:

Make sure the new test type still meets the criteria for good quality testing, and that you still test the Learning Objectives of the course at the appropriate level. When you change the test format, please discuss this also with the programme director, as this influences the test programme in the programme.

More information:

See the Testing and Assessment website