The changing role of GTAs in bioscience labs: challenges and opportunities in a digital era

Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) play a crucial role in bioscience laboratory teaching, particularly as student numbers rise across the sector. GTAs are often the most frequent point of contact for students and significantly influence learning, team dynamics and the sense of academic community despite being largely untrained in teaching. Our previous work highlighted that effective GTA support must span cognitive, affective and psychomotor learning domains, and we proposed a multimodal training model. However, how this approach scales to accommodate ever-growing cohort sizes remains unclear—particularly in teaching labs. We discussed this challenge over the past few years in our interactive bioscience education conference sessions. These discussions offered valuable insights into the current and future roles of GTAs in large cohort labs and how digital technologies could help reduce the number of GTAs required, potentially easing pressure on staffing while maintaining or enhancing student learning. In this article, we reflect on both the opportunities and potential threats of this approach, particularly as institutions respond to sector-wide financial challenges by expanding cohort sizes and redeveloping curricula. As the teaching lab remains the most critical environment for hands-on science education, we believe this article will resonate with the wider bioscience education community.