Being a Teaching Assistant: The Essentials

Email and maillists

In some courses, a significant component of course communication from the instructor is done via email, often replacing meetings late in the semester. It is important that you check your email regularly (daily) and carefully, and act upon any instructions from the course instructor.

If you are unable to access your email from home, please let your course instructor know.

Setting an email policy for students

Be sure to set up an email policy and communicate it clearly to your students (and then follow it!). A policy typically includes:

format: For example, having students indicate the course in the subject line and including the sender's name in the body
content: Will you accept "content questions" (if so, it's a good idea to have students include what they think the answer is) or administrative questions only?
response time: This should be timely, but reasonable, ex. within 24 - 48 hours during weekdays, no "last minute" exam questions. Will you address email over weekends?
whether or not you'll accept email during the exam period

Email can eat up a large part of your time if you let it; keep your time for office hours where philosophical questions can be best addressed.

Email lists (maillists) for tutorials

A tutorial email list can be useful, but be careful not to create a student reliance on TA emails for such things as tutorial notes or overheads. There should be little need (if any) to email notes or overheads to students.

Obtaining a maillist

Maillists can be obtained from your course supervisor. Once the request has been processed, you will be the manager of the maillists. This will allow you to email the tutorial group or locate individual student addresses, add students to the maillist, and access the current roster (updated nightly). Manager access will be removed at semester changeover.

Using the maillists

The maillist name is formed from the discipline abbreviation (phil) and course number, followed by a dash and the tutorial number. All of this is followed by @sfu.

For example, Philosophy 120w, tutorial D108 would be: phil120w-d108@sfu.ca

Philosophy XX1, tutorial D121 would be: philxx1-d121@sfu.ca

To use the maillists, type in the full address (including the @sfu.ca) in the "to" field of SFU Connect or your regular email program. Unless you indicated otherwise when requesting your list, you will automatically receive copies of the emails you send to the list. Note that students are unable to send to the list by default, but it is possible to enable this.

Accessing the roster

A student roster (enrolment list) is available from the maillist application. It is updated nightly, however do not delete any student information you have (assignments etc.) for students who have disappeared from the roster without first checking with the course supervisor. Students often change tutorials, and any assignments you have recorded may be required to determine to student's course grade.

To access the roster:

Log in to the maillist application using your SFU ID (the part of your email address before the @ sign) and password. The application is located here: http://maillist.sfu.ca/ It is also available by going to the SFU home page, click on "SFU Online" and then on "Manage Maillists".
In the menu on the left, click on "Find maillists owned/managed by me". (You can also search for a specific list in the "Go to list" box. This will take you directly to the list.)
Click on the desired list to display the list information, and then click on the "Maillist Members" tab.
Click on "Detailed Roster" (in blue). This will give you a list of students in the tutorial along with their computing IDs and student numbers.
To download the list click on "Download text file" (in blue, at the bottom of the list). You can open this file in Excel (or another spreadsheet program) or a word processing program.

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