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Video 1: Expectations
[MUSIC PLAYING]
GUOLONG: Good morning, students.
STUDENTS: Good morning, Mr. Su.
GUOLONG: Can anyone tell me the answer, please?
STUDENTS: I can!
GUOLONG: Is everything clear?
STUDENTS: Yes, perfectly clear.
GUOLONG: Are there any other questions?
STUDENTS: No, no questions.
GUOLONG: I will see you on Tuesday.
STUDENTS: Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
NARRATOR: Wait a minute. That's not what happens in real life. Actual MIT undergraduates often come to class on three hours of sleep.
GUOLONG: Can anyone tell me the answer, please?
NARRATOR: Sometimes they're afraid to volunteer what might be the wrong answer.
GUOLONG: [INAUDIBLE] lecture by considering a simple example.
NARRATOR: They're not always paying attention.
STUDENT: What?
NARRATOR: And they might not understand what you thought you explained well.
GUOLONG: Is everything clear?
STUDENTS: Not really.
NARRATOR: So how can you be a successful TA at MIT? Try thinking of your class as a popular website that visitors come back to again and again. What makes a website user-friendly?
CAROL: User-friendly to me means that in order to complete the task at hand, the website is designed in a way that's logical.
CHANDLER: Yeah. I feel like format, just a clean, simple format is really nice.
ADRIAN: It's not cluttered and messy.
BILLY: The most important things for a user-friendly website is a clear interface, simple categories, and a search option.
ADRIAN: And accessible language.
CHANDLER: So being able to find things very efficiently and quickly is definitely pretty important.
ADRIAN: I think it's more user-friendly when you can actually understand what they want you to do and where things are.
CAROL: Being able to find the right things in a way that's easy.
NARRATOR: In other words, a user-friendly website.
GUOLONG: Should be the designed with a thinking that to make the user feel happy and easy, instead of making the computer engineers to feel happy and easy.
NARRATOR: What if the engineer is a teacher and the user a student?
ADRIAN: The main principle of accessibility should be the same.
CHANDLER: A website should be simple, clean, and also, like, should have where you want to go right away. And a teacher should be able to judge where the students need, what the students need to where the students want to go and adapt in that way.
BILLY: I guess like the Search button would be asking the TA or asking the professor for more information.
ADRIAN: It's not necessarily that everyone is going to be your friend. But it's more about being easy to understand.
BILLY: In terms of having a clear interface, just a simple structure of the class, something that students can expect, like the lectures go the same way, the recitation go the same way, and something that students can expect.
NARRATOR: So organization and predictability are key to the user-friendly class.
CAROL: Planning that way in a logical session, where you, like, review things that are necessary and then going into problem, practice problems, and then going over what were the right answers, I thought that was, like, pretty user-friendly for a student. Because it was a good review and then good practice. So it was, like, logical.
TA: For today's recitation, we're going to do--
NARRATOR: The TA acts as a guide for the students.
BILLY: It's important to, well, explain the learning objectives of the class early on.
CHANDLER: Have just, like, an air of confidence and be able to direct the recitation.
BILLY: A very big expectation in a recitation is for the TA to provide us with the big picture of the concepts.
NARRATOR: The TA is approachable and supportive.
ADRIAN: You need to feel that you can approach them and ask questions without any problem.
NARRATOR: And knowledgeable.
CAROL: The most important thing for a TA is that they have to have a very solid understanding of what's going on in the material.
NARRATOR: But is knowledge enough?
BILLY: Unfortunately, it's not enough to simply be knowledgeable about the subject. It's the way you present it, the way you communicate it.
CHANDLER: They're all very smart. I know they all know what they're talking about. So it's just how they can communicate that to us.
NARRATOR: So what is good communication in the user-friendly classroom?
CHANDLER: The biggest thing that came across my mind was definitely, like, how they answered questions and the feedback they got the students and how they responded to that.
ADRIAN: It's not the same when they read a paper, and they just write the problem in the board and solve the problem than explaining, why is it going like this? Or why is it working like this?
CAROL: I think just a willingness to clarify is very, very important.
BILLY: Being patient and being able to explain the same concept in different ways.
ADRIAN: And they can actually explain it to you at a basic undergrad level.
NARRATOR: In the next videos, we will learn communication skills and strategies to meet students' expectations and create a user-friendly classroom.