University of California, Riverside
Application for 2009 Larry L. Sautter Award
Teaching Assistant Allocation Committee (TAAC)
Figure 1 – TAonline Collage
TAAC system features:
 Innovative use of technology resulting in increased effectiveness and best practices
 Transparency at all levels within a competitive selection process
 Ease of use for students and faculty in transitioning from term-to-term and year-to-year
 Seamless integration with other campus systems to import data
 Large time and effort savings permitting resources to focus on appointments
 Adoptable by other UCR departments/colleges and other UC campuses
“ … TAonline saves me weeks of work each academic year.
Thanks for providing me with a wonderful team
of responsive collaborators. …”
Dr. Linda Walling
Professor of Genetics
Division Dean for Life Sciences, CNAS
Acting TAAC Coordinator
Page 1 of 11
Overview:
TAships are awarded based on multiple criteria, including a student's knowledge and
experience with the materials in a class, a need to fulfill the teaching requirements for
their degree program, financial need, instructor request for a specific student to be a TA,
and a desire to attain teaching experience to achieve future career goals. The Teaching
Assistant Allocation Committee (TAAC) is a body of faculty members who are tasked
with the selection of the most qualified graduate students who have applied to TA courses
and who meet the criteria set forth within College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences
(CNAS) TA Policies.
Prior to the TA online system, the TAAC Coordinator would begin working on the
upcoming term’s TA manual allocation system several weeks before making a call for
student applications. The TAAC Coordinator utilized voluminous Excel worksheets to
document a myriad of requirements. After receipt of the student applications, the TAAC
Coordinator would input massive amounts of student data into the worksheets. Working
with the volume of data required rigid version control to maintain the integrity of the
worksheets.
The significant amount of time and effort by the TAAC Coordinator to gather and
consolidate the necessary data for review by the TAAC committee was immediately
followed by three to four TAAC meetings which typically would take 2 hours to consult
and make collective decisions on the TA allocations. After the decisions were made by
the Committee, the administrative staff would then proceed with a rather prolonged
manual process of notifying students, major professors, program advisors, department
chairs, program chairs, etc. of the TAAC decisions.
The former method of the TA allocation process represented an arduous and timeconsuming process which consumed untold hours and which needed to be performed
three times within each academic year.
Project Summary:
The Teaching Assistant Allocation Committee (TAAC) needed a web-based teaching
assistant allocation system that would allow graduate students to electronically submit
T.A. applications for the TAships they require. In parallel with the submittal of students’
T.A. applications, the system allows instructors, academic coordinators, program
advisors, major professors, and other faculty mentors to electronically nominate those
graduate students to whom they would like to award the TAships.
The broad solution is comprised of two major processes: (1) the electronic submittal of
student TA applications, and (2) the faculty and TAAC review, evaluation, and final
Page 2 of 11
decisions of the TA submittals. For a graphic illustration of these processes, please see
Figure 2- Student Flow Process and Figure 3-Faculty Process Flow on the following
pages.
Student Process
TA Online Student
Application Flow
This diagram represents the student
Student Completes
Application
side of the Teaching Assistant
Application process. As noted in the
Email notice to
Student
illustration, the process starting from
Application
RETURNED
Major Professor/
Faculty Mentor
reviews application:
Approves, Not
Approves, or Returns
to Applicant
top down begins with the student’s
completion of an online TA
application. The process proceeds in
Application
APPROVED
Application
RETURNED
prescribed manner through all
necessary approvals. At each stage of
Program Advisor
reviews application:
Approves, Not
Approves, or Returns
to Applicant
the student approval/non-approval
process, emails are automatically
generated.
Application
APPROVED
Teaching Assistant
Allocation Committee
Selects TA Candidates
Figure 2 - Student Flow Process
Page 3 of 11
Faculty Process
The processes illustrated in
the flow chart at left occur
in parallel to the student
application submission and
approval process.
The Instructors, Academic
Coordinators, Department
TAAC Reps, and Program
TAAC reps may request
and/or exclude students
based upon pre-defined
policies. Again, this
process is all email
enabled.
Figure 3 - Faculty and TAAC Process
Project Team Members:
Jack Cui
Toni Henderson
Mary Livaudais
Eric Martin
Joanna Nguyen
Page 4 of 11
TAAC Project Highlights:

Redeployment ability
While TAonline was created for CNAS, it was designed to accommodate any entity
and/or department. Presently, other departments within in the college are collaborating
with C&C on the usage of TAonline for their TAship programs.

Code Share
It is noted that while all the UC’s offer TAship information on their websites, only a
handful offer an online program. UCR’s TAAC is an ambitious and robust on-line
system that fully accommodates both student and faculty TAship needs. In this time of
economic setbacks, this program could offer real and substantial value to other UC’s in
terms of financial savings and resource leveraging in the management of their TAships.
UCR is prepared to collaborate with other UCs towards this end.

Transparency
Because the program is thoroughly transparent and records can be archived for years,
data is easily retrievable for audit purposes. The processes are easily tracked from the
initial student application submittal through the faculty and TAAC decision-making.

Self-Sustaining from Academic Year and Term-to-Term
Self-sustainability is one of the major project highlights of TAAC. The Staff
Administrator controls the events that occur within the TAAC system by performing
tasks within the set-up page for the academic year and the Maintain Processes set up for
each term within the academic year. See Figure 4-Academic Year Setup on the following
page.
Page 5 of 11
Set-up Processes
Figure 4 – Academic Year Set-up
Within the Academic Year Setup page, a menu appears that lists all the steps that need to
be completed for the TA process for the new year. When each of the steps is completed,
a checkmark appears.
Within the Maintain Processes page, Figure 5, a process is opened by selecting the start
and end dates. When a process opens, emails are automatically generated to the each role
affected, i.e., Instructor, Academic Coordinator, etc., notifying them that they must go to
their respective website pages and review and/or perform their assigned tasks, i.e., make
Requests for Inclusion/Exclusion of students for TAship.
Page 6 of 11
Figure 5 - Maintain Processes
Other highlights include the following:

Validation through Central Accounting System (CAS) using NetID
authentication

Transparency at all levels

Robust reporting mechanism

Automated email generation

Ad hoc email capability for non-standard email functionality

Incorporation of business rules and policies

Integration with other campus systems to import data

Archive capabilities

Paperless “green” process contributes to a healthy environment

Requires near-zero human intervention

Easy set up processes / maintenance
Page 7 of 11

High client satisfaction

Reduced TAAC process time allows focus on the core selection process
Roles:
The TAonline system has several roles:
Student
Students can sign on to taonline.ucr.edu after receiving an
email notification that the process has been opened to
submit TA applications. Students have the capability to
complete the application sections in whatever order they
desire. A menu of sections is always available to the
student reminding them of sections completed and those
not completed. Students can review/edit their applications
at any time during the open student submittal process.
After application submittal, students receive notification of
their approval or non-approval, or a request to modify and
resubmit their applications.
Major Professor,
Instructor, Academic
Coordinator, TAAC
Program Representative,
TAAC Department
Representative
These roles sign-in to their pages after receiving email
notification that the process has been opened to submit their
Requests for Inclusion/Exclusion. A link is contained
within the email notification that will take them to the signin page.
TAAC Coordinator
This role represents the head of the TAAC Committee and
has full access and rights within the TA online system. The
TAAC Coordinator determines the calendar year events for
TAAC, prepares for and leads the TAAC meetings, and
works closely with the Staff Administrator.
Staff Administrator
The Staff Administrator is responsible for setting up the
Academic Year processes, and Maintains the Processes for
the terms within the year. This person is also responsible
for sending various emails through the Ad Hoc email
functionality.
Financial Analysts and
Students Affairs Officers
These roles have access to the TAAC online system for the
purpose of making queries, creating and printing reports,
and performing trend analyses.
Page 8 of 11
Technical and System Overview:
The system is built on an Oracle database with Oracle’s procedural language, PL/SQL.
Timeframe of Implementation:
Concept and design commenced in January 2007. The software was deployed to
students, designated faculty, and TAAC in April of 2007.
While initial deployment was most successful and well received, the system was further
enhanced in Spring 2008 to include a term-to-term foundation rather than an academic
year base. This enhancement made the system even more flexible and easy to use for all
concerned. This enhancement was deployed in Fall 2008. The system is now entering its
3rd academic year and continues to impress and delight those who use it.
Objective Customer Satisfaction
Because student and course information is consolidated, summarized, and hyperlinked
within the Teaching Assistant Assignment Grid, Figure 6, the actual TAAC selection
process is streamlined and efficient. (Student names are intentionally blurred.)
Figure 6 – Teaching Assistant Assignment Grid
“…marvel at the rapidity that the TAAC representatives could make informed decisions.
Our ability to access student applications to determine graduate student preparedness …
has truly enabled our meetings.”
Page 9 of 11
“…It only took two hours to make the decisions for an entire quarter. This is
remarkable. … Furthermore, the records of TAAC action are transparent and accessible
making everyone comfortable with the system.”
“TAonline is marvelous …”
Dr. Linda Walling
Professor of Genetics
Division Dean for Life Sciences, CNAS
Acting TAAC Coordinator
“Teaching assistants (TAs) are an integral component of the instructional delivery
program in CNAS and the related costs are a material line item in our budget.
Historically, the assignment of TAs to courses and tracking of related budgetary
information was handled in a manual fashion by numerous individuals across the
college; this was inefficient at best. For the Life Sciences, TA On-line can accomplish, in
a much more efficient and effective manner, what used to "take a village". As Chief
Financial Officer for the College, I am thrilled about the reporting functionality of the
system, as in a matter of a few keystrokes, my staff and I can access information that in
the past would have required hours of time to assemble. This enables us to understand
commitments made for TA appointments and to better track the utilization of TA
resources and control related budgets. I look forward to the implementation of this
functionality in the Physical and Mathematical Sciences division.”
Georgianne Carlson
Executive Assistant Dean, Chief Financial Officer
College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences
“Before we had the TA online System at UCR for the collection of TA Applications and
Assignment of Teaching Assistants in the Life Sciences, the entire process was completed
on paper. A student affairs officer was charged with collecting approximately 200 paper
applications and then duplicating them for Department Faculty and Program Faculty to
review. Following lengthy faculty meetings, we then had to transcribe some of the data
on the paper applications along with the final TA assignments into multiple electronic
forms used by various entities.
Page 10 of 11
The creation of the electronic system has greatly simplified the process, eliminated a lot
of staff time re-entering data, and eliminated many of the data entry errors that existed in
the past.”
Kathy Redd
Director – Student Affairs Office
College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences
Submitter’s Name, Title, and Contact Information:
Toni Henderson, Project Manager
University of California, Riverside
Computing and Communications
(951) 827-3799
Page 11 of 11