Designing a Collaborative Online Learning Experience to Train Graduate Teaching Assistants Using a Sociocultural Framework

Abstract

At Imperial College London, the Department of Materials and the Centre for Academic English have collaborated for over three years training Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) to support undergraduates’ academic literacy through marking and feedback on coursework and technical reports. We show how we acted agilely in lockdown, experimenting with the Microsoft Teams collaboration hub and OneNote app to shift the session online and incorporating sociocultural theories for learning design to enhance learning in the online environment. Data from focus groups and interviews reveal students’ reflections through the lens of both doctoral student and GTA on three main themes of engagement, learning with and from others and communication. We show how their reflections will help us reshape the session agilely again as we enter the post-pandemic ‘new normal’.