Multiple instructors

All Courses: Pedagogy and Best Practices
1

In a team teaching situation, a section needs to have multiple instructors. The way this is done on other teaching platforms is that one of the instructor creates the section and sends the other instructions for joining the section. Once the second instructor has joined the section, the first instructor (the section owner) promotes the second to a co-instructor or teaching assistant role.

Does the code.org teacher platform provide a similar functionality such situations? If not, have others found some way that works for a team-teaching situation?

Thanks for any insights.
Laurie Dillon

2

This is a common request. It can be done if you follow the instructions in the post below paying particular attention to instruction #8.

Let us know if you run into any issues.

Mike

3

Thanks, Mike! This is helpful!!

When you have a minute, Iā€™d like to describe a bit of our context and to check that my understanding of the recommendation in the post is correct and doable:

We are offering three coding clubs. About 22 undergraduate ā€˜mentorsā€™ are doing the teaching. Since the clubs are remote this spring, the mentors need a good platform for monitoring how coders are progressing. Would it make sense for us to create a section for each club which is owned by one lead mentor and then create sections for each of the other mentors and ā€˜joinā€™ each student to the sections of all the mentors teaching the club the student is enrolled in (choosing the ā€˜Yesā€™ option at step 8)? So a student could be simultaneously in up to 10 sections. (The mentors are not distributed evenly across the clubs.) With such a set up, will a student see a single section or multiple sections? (Seeing 10 sections and having to select one to join might be a bit intimidating at firstā€”but maybe not if it doesnā€™t matter which the student select.)

Also, could you point us to documentation for the teacher interface so we can determine what monitoring capability the platform gives us? Weā€™d like to be able to see information such as what activities coders have attempted, how many times they tried an activity, if they succeeded, time info, etc. Anything to help determine if they are engaging, where they might be getting stuck, etc.

Thanks very much for the feedback (and even more for the great community resources for learning coding)!

Laura

4

Iā€™ll be honest. I havenā€™t attempted to assign a student to so many teachers, so Iā€™m not 100% sure what that would look like from the student point of view, but I would think it would work. Just not sure what they would see.

If you want to see more about managing students, hereā€™s a link. https://support.code.org/hc/en-us/articles/115000693231-Viewing-student-progress

This is part of a series of articles on ā€œgetting started with Code.orgā€ that you can find on that same page.

Some of what you are asking for is available, but I donā€™t believe the number of attempts is one of those options. Code.org continues adding features to the teacher dashboard and I do find it manageable with my classes, but there are always features that would be nice if added and over time it continues to improve.

Maybe some others will comment if they have tried having students assigned to more than 2 or 3 classrooms.

Mike

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