Creating a TA Site

This document briefly outlines the steps needed to create a TA site as a sub-site within the umbrella of a course. TAs may find such a site useful particularly in large courses where addings discussion forums for all sections in one course site may be overwhelming to a student or other course user.

Documentation

This documentation will assume the CCLE site is being viewed by someone in a TA role.

1. After logging in and accessing the course for which you want to make a TA site, click on the yellow Control Panel button in the top right corner of the site screen.

2. At the bottom right of the screen, in the section “Other tools”, is a link for TA sites. Click this to move to the initial setup screen.

3. The Create TA site presents two options relating to student access: Students on in the TAs sections and the entire course.

4. Access can be changed at a later date.  See below

5. One should select “Students only in my section, click the accept box, and click “Create TA site”

Open

1. A successful site creation should result in a screen resembling the screenshot below, with a green box indicating the name of the site that was added and a listing of Existing TA sites.

   1. It’s important here to note that the site is available to students in the correct sections.  

   2. Errors can occur due to database issues.  In those cases, it’s a CCLE backend issue and a support ticket should be opened.

Open

The site is now created and the section TA and students may rejoice!

Site Settings

As mentioned above, access to the site may be modified within the TA site settings.  Of particular importance is the main Groups settings of the site.  Carry out the following steps to ensure correct access, or modify them:

1. In the Administration Menu, Course Administration, click Edit Settings.

2. Within the Edit Course Settings menu, scroll down to Groups

1. The following settings should be in place:

   1. Public/Private: Enable

   2. Group mode: Separate Groups

   3. Force group mode: No

   4. Default Grouping: TA Section Materials

2. The Default Grouping setting is the key element.  TA Section Materials will allow access to only students enrolled in the discussion section that correlates to the TA Site. Other options in the drop down can limit access to a single section or can allow access to the entire course. Problems with this Default Group setting can result in a error message when building a TA Site, see the section on “CCLE TA Site Errors” below on directions for how to fix this.

Adding Users

Sometimes you may need to add a class participant who was not enrolled via the registrar’s system to a TA site.  This situation is complicated by the fact that the participant likely was not added to a section group.  Generally, the system does not allow a user to be added directly to the TA site.  We need to ensure groups are properly adjusted.

Usually the information provided via the registrar enrolls a student into a particular section, which you can view via Course Administration > Users > Groups

In this example we see a group for Discussion Group 1A in a large course.  Those listed as students were added automatically via the registrar’s system, and the one student listed as participant was manually added to the group.

People can be added or removed from a group by clicking Add/remove users under the right column.  Only individuals already added to the course itself can be added to a group.  Therefore you must first add the person as a participant to course list.  Once a participant is added to the group, they should be able to access the TA site assuming that the settings for the TA site are correct (outlined above).

CCLE TA Site Errors

What do I do if I get an error message when I create a TA Site?

Sometimes, when building a TA site, you will receive an error message or see that the newly built TA site is open to ALL students within a course instead of being restricted to a specific section. If this happens, follow the steps below to allow the site to be visible ONLY to students enrolled within the proper section.

Fixing a broken TA site:

Go into the TA Site settings via the Admin Panel (TA Site Admin Panel>Settings and Backup>Edit Settings) and compared them to one of the TA sites for the course that does not have the same error.

You should see that under the Group settings, the TA site is not set to a) separate groups and b) TA Section Materials. You can select “separate groups” from the drop down menu for Group Mode, but the option to select TA Section Materials in the dropdown menu for Default Grouping is not available. This is because for some reason unknown to us, the TA Section Materials grouping was not created when the TA site was built.

Under the Admin Panel in the TA Site, click on Groups then under Groupings you can confirm that there is no TA Section Materials grouping.

To created one, click on “create grouping” and then type in “TA Section Materials” as the grouping name. The, to the far right of the new grouping name, click on the icon that looks like a person, this is where you add or remove groups from a grouping. Double check in the main course page which discussion section should have access to this TA Site, then move the appropriate groups into the TA Section Materials grouping. Remember to make sure to move ALL discussion sections that should have access to this TA Site into the grouping, especially if the course is cross listed.

Lastly, go back into the TA Site Course Settings (TA Site Admin Panel, under the Settings and Backup section click on ‘Edit Settings) and under Groups, make the changes so that the Group Mode is set to 'Separate Groups’ and the Default Grouping is set to “TA Section Materials”.

Lastly, return to the main course CCLE Page, then go to Manage TA Sites (Main course Admin Panel, under Manage Materials section) and confirm that the TA Site is now restricted to only the discussion sections being taught by that TA.