Promote a student to teaching assistant
Updated 19 Feb 2024
You can promote an active student in your Mastering course to the teaching assistant role, including courses paired with an LMS. You can hide/show teaching assistants in the student view of the course details. Compare teaching assistant and section instructor roles
- The teaching assistant role applies within one course and not to any other course in which the student is enrolled.
- Teaching assistants automatically see correct answers and more. Teaching assistants need specific privileges to see grades, edit assignments or to do other tasks.
- Teaching assistants cannot copy the course, edit course details, or delete the course. Instructor course owners can make these changes.
- Although the Instructor Resources option appears in the course menu for teaching assistants, they cannot access these. (Instructor Resources require either a Pearson Educator account or a section instructor account.)
For another instructor or department coordinator to enroll as a section instructor, see instructions to add a section instructor.
- From the My Courses page, select Details then Open roster.
(From your course, you can select Manage Course from the main menu, and then select Course Roster or in Mastering, Roles and Enrollment Status.)
- To find the active student you want to promote to teaching assistant in the Name column, type a few letters of the student's name or email address in the search field . (Select Show All to clear your search results.) You can also choose the first letter of the student’s last name in the alphabetical list.
- In the Role column, select Student.
Note: If a student is enrolled with temporary access, the student's role cannot be changed during the active temporary access period. After the student pays for full access, the Role menu is available.
- For Role, select Teaching Assistant.
You can later change this option back to Student to discontinue access to instructor tools.
- Select close to go back to the list.
The student’s row is highlighted to indicate a change.
- Change the role for additional students, if necessary.
- Select Save to apply changes to all highlighted rows in the list, or Cancel to discard all changes and close the roster. The student’s role is now Teaching Assistant, with viewing but not editing privileges.
- Add the course privileges that the teaching assistant will need to assist you in the course.
By default teaching assistants are hidden from the Teaching Staff list in the details. If there are many teaching assistants in your course, you might want to show only a few of them to keep the Teaching Staff list short.
Hiding teaching assistants does not change their access privileges in the course.
- From the My Courses page, select Details then Open roster.
- Use the search field or the alphabetical list to find a teaching assistant in the Name column.
The Hide column indicates whether the teaching assistant is currently shown or hidden in students’ course details.
- In the Hide column select Hidden or Shown.
- For Hide/show name in students' course details, select Hide or Show.
- Select close to go back to the list.
The row is highlighted to indicate a change.
- Change the role for additional teaching assistants, if necessary.
- Select Save to apply changes to all highlighted rows in the list, or Cancel to discard all changes and close the roster.
For more about what teaching instructors can do in a course and how to edit their privileges, see Section instructor course privileges.