Teaching is rarely a solitary enterprise. Paraprofessionals, teaching assistants, special education teachers, facilitators, tutors, and other support personnel may all help students complete their work. This is especially true in remote courses, where the classroom teacher and the adults assisting students may be working in different schools—or even different time zones.
Until now, Innovation Assessments was organized mainly around two kinds of users: teachers who created and scored assignments and students who completed them. That model worked, but it left an important group out.
The new Staff Access system provides authorized support personnel with a useful, read-only view of a teacher’s course.
Sharing a Course Without Sharing Teacher Controls
A teacher can invite a staff member from the course-management page by entering the person’s email address. The recipient receives a private invitation link. Each invitation can be used only once and expires after seven days.
If the recipient already has an Innovation Assessments account, the course is added to that account. If not, the invitation guides the person through creating a staff account.
The important distinction is that staff members are not made co-owners of the course. They cannot change assignments, alter student responses, enter scores, edit feedback, manage enrollment, or modify the teacher’s course settings. They receive the information needed to support students without receiving the controls needed to administer the course.
I think this is an important boundary. The goal is not to reproduce the teacher dashboard with a few buttons removed. The goal is to provide a separate interface designed around the actual work of classroom support personnel.
A Read-Only View of Student Work
A staff member begins at the Shared Courses dashboard. From there, the person can open courses that teachers have shared and preview the visible assignments inside them.
The staff interface supports the major Innovation Assessments applications, including tests, writing assignments, Études, conversations, Presto recordings, WordStudy activities, sorting and ordering tasks, Cloze exercises, media activities, and other student-work formats.
Staff members can review:
- Student responses and submitted work.
- Recorded scores.
- Teacher feedback.
- Assignment completion information.
- Read-only versions of the tasks students received.
- Available scorecards and class results.
This is particularly useful when a student tells a teaching assistant, “I don’t understand why I received this score.” The staff member can now look at the assignment, the student’s response, and the teacher’s feedback instead of trying to reconstruct the situation from the student’s description alone.
A Gradebook Designed Around the Student
A classroom teacher often wants to begin with a classwide gradebook grid. A teaching assistant, on the other hand, is frequently concerned first with one particular student.
The Staff Gradebook was designed with this distinction in mind. Staff members can select a student and see a vertical scorecard showing that student’s assignments, scores, feedback, completion status, and links to the corresponding work. A class grid remains available when a wider view is useful.
The scorecard may also be downloaded as a CSV file. Staff members can choose which assignments to include rather than downloading an entire year’s worth of work. Module titles and subtitles are included to help place each task in its instructional context.
“Set My Students”
Remote and combined classes introduced another problem. A single course may contain students attending from several schools, each with a different facilitator or teaching assistant. A staff member at one location may need to support four students in a class of twenty.
The Set My Students feature lets each staff member choose which students should appear in that person’s staff views. Once selected, the choice applies throughout the shared course.
The staff member’s gradebook, class results, student work, and proctor activity are then limited to that selected group. Another staff member assigned to the same course may choose a different group.
This makes the interface less cluttered, but it also follows a sensible privacy principle: people should ordinarily see the student information necessary for the work they are assigned to perform.
Read-Only Proctor Activity
Many Innovation Assessments applications record browser and task events that can help a teacher understand how a student interacted with an assignment. Staff members can now review this information through a centralized, read-only Proctor Activity page.
The class overview displays such information as:
- The number of recorded events.
- Departures from the task window or browser tab.
- Security or restriction signals.
- Evidence of completion.
- The most recent activity time.
A staff member may then select an assigned student to see a human-readable timeline. Technical event data remains available in a collapsed section when closer investigation is necessary.
These records require cautious interpretation. A browser event does not prove that a student was—or was not—paying attention. A tab change may deserve a conversation, but it is not by itself proof of misconduct. The system presents the evidence while leaving judgment where it belongs: with the educators who know the student and the circumstances.
Staff access to proctor information does not include teacher actions. Staff members cannot readmit a student, unlock a secure assessment, run an AI proctor analysis, or manage a live session.
Teachers Remain in Control
The course owner can remove a staff member’s access at any time. Removing access from one course does not disturb any other legitimate course assignments the person may have.
Staff access is also logged. Teachers and administrators can retain a record of staff activity such as opening a shared course, viewing a task, reviewing student work, or accessing proctor information. This provides useful accountability without turning the interface into a surveillance system of its own.
Unused staff-only accounts are also managed through an account lifecycle. When a staff member no longer has any course assignments, the account becomes inactive. A new invitation can reactivate it during the inactive period. After ninety days without an assignment, personal account details are anonymized and the credentials are invalidated. Invitation records are retained for up to one year.
When a Teaching Assistant Is Also a Teacher
Some support personnel are teachers themselves. A person might assist students in one remote course while teaching separate classes of their own.
A staff member can now create a permanent Free teacher workspace using the same account. The Staff dashboard presents an obvious Create My Teacher Workspace option. After confirmation, the person can create and manage courses as a teacher while retaining read-only access to all courses previously shared with them.
There is no duplicate account and no need for a second login. The teacher’s own courses appear in the regular teacher workspace, while courses owned by somebody else remain under Shared Courses with the original staff permissions intact.
Support Without Surrendering the Course
The Staff Access system reflects a practical truth about education: students are often supported by more than one adult, but those adults do not all need the same authority.
Teachers should not have to share passwords or surrender control of a course merely to let a teaching assistant see whether a student completed an assignment. Support personnel should not have to work from incomplete information when they are expected to help a learner.
Staff Access provides a middle ground: enough information to offer informed assistance, carefully limited controls, individually scoped student access, and accountability for the use of the system.
It is a modest idea, perhaps, but one that can make cooperation among teachers and classroom support personnel considerably easier.
Authorship note: This feature announcement was generated by artificial intelligence using samples of David Jones’s blog writing as a stylistic guide. It was reviewed for consistency with the current Innovation Assessments Staff Access feature.
