[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.