Promote a student to teaching assistant

Updated 08 Nov 2023

Use the roster to promote an active student to the teaching assistant role in your course. A teaching assistant is a student who helps an instructor manage aspects of a course and has course privileges defined by the instructor.

Teaching assistants can’t access the roster, can't change students' status, can't edit course details, and can't delete a course. The teaching assistant role applies within one course and not to any other course in which the student is enrolled.

If you have many teaching assistants in your course, use the roster to hide or show teaching assistants in students’ course details.

If you add student tutors, interpreters, accessibility assistants, or others who should not see student grades, enroll them as teaching assistants. Check their accesses to make sure they cannot see grades. By default, teaching assistants don't see grades.

If you want to enroll another instructor as section instructor, do not follow these steps to promote a student. Instead, use a section instructor access code and follow the steps to enroll a section instructor. Contact your Pearson support rep to learn if you can obtain section instructor access codes for your course.

  1. Select the enrolled number for the course on the My Courses page. For example, Enrolled: 10.

    The roster opens.

  2. 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.
  3. In the Role column, select Student.

    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 access, the Role menu is available.

  4. For Role, select Teaching Assistant.

    You can later change this option back to Student to discontinue access to instructor tools.

    You can’t give teaching assistants access to the roster.

  5. Close the window to go back to the list.

    The student’s row is highlighted to indicate a change.

  6. Change the role for additional students in the list, if necessary.
  7. Select Save to apply changes to all highlighted rows in the list, or select Cancel to discard all changes and close the roster.

    The student’s role is now Teaching Assistant.

The Enrolled count for each course on the My Courses page includes both students and teaching assistants listed in the roster. For example, Enrolled: 10 might include 8 students and 2 teaching assistants.

You can choose to show or hide teaching assistants in students’ course details. 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.

  1. 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.

  2. In the Hide column select Hidden or Shown.
  3. For Hide/show name in students' course details, select Hide or Show.
  4. Close the window to go back to the list.

    The student’s row is highlighted to indicate a change.

  5. Change the option for additional teaching assistants, if necessary.
  6. Select Save to apply changes to all highlighted rows in the list, or select Cancel to discard all changes and close the roster.