Onboarding - Information and tasks for onboarding new TAs/ULAs
Participation Requirement
CMPSC 156 is structured so that nearly all “lectures” and “discussion” are actually hands-on learning activities where students work in groups on software engineering activities.
As such, we typically need all staff (all TAs and ULAs) to be available in every lecture and every discsusion section.
If that will be an issue, please raise it with the instructor as soon as possible.
Onboarding to systems
Course Slack
The main way in which the staff communicate with one another and with the students is through a Slack Workspace.
Look for an invitation to the course slack, and the #staff channel. Please monitor the #staff channel and the #all-ucsb-cs156-qxx channel every univeristy work day throughout your appointment. (Here, and throughout this document, qxx stands for the current quarter, e.g. f26).
(You are not required or expected to monitor the slack on weekends or university holidays, though you may choose to do so it if helps you to balance your workload.)
Frontiers
We use a tool called frontiers (available at https://frontiers.dokku-00.cs.ucsb.edu) to manage the course and the Github organization for the course.
Please visit https://frontiers.dokku-00.cs.ucsb.edu, where you should see CS156 listed as a “staff” course. Click the “Join Course” button and then follow the instructions. This should issue you an invitation to the Github organization for the course with “owner” privileges.
Canvas/Gradescope
You should receive an invitation to join the Canvas site for the course as TA.
Once you accept this invitation, the instructor can “Sync Canvas Roster” so that you also have TA access in Gradescope.
Code Owners files
Once all staff have registered on frontiers, it will be straightforward to get a list of all of their github ids via the staff tab on Frontiers.
Those github ids need to be updated in CODEOWNERS files in several repos; this needs to be done before the student team copies of those repos are created.
Here are the places that needs to be updated:
Roles of TAs and ULAs
TAs will typically lead the discussion sections.
The instructor will typically lead the lecture sections, while TAs will typically lead the discussion sections.
The plan for each discussion section will typically be posted on the course website under “lectures”, and/or disseminated in the course slack.