Text: Guido Camps Imagine that you, a WUR employee, decide to take on an additional task alongside your usual work. The task comprises roughly 30 ECTS, which is six months’ work. Would your manager accept this just like that? At the very least, they would want a plan of action detailing how you would combine your current work with this task, whether you planned to take leave, etc. And they might not agree to you taking on the task at all.
But that’s not how it works for teachers training for the Basic Teaching Qualification (BKO, or UTQ in English). As a matter of fact, this whole course comes on top of your existing set of duties – and every teacher takes it. The Dutch universities association VSNU has established a standard qualification for lecturers.
Where do teachers get the time from?
This ‘Basic’ Teaching Qualification attests to the lecturers’ didactic competence. The BKO trajectory was completely revised recently and has been turned into an even more extensive and thorough programme. Wonderful! We get better education thanks to this instrument.
But where do lecturers get the time required for this BKO training? Do they get six months off? Are they exempted from teaching? Do they not have to publish as much? Or is it just added to all the tasks they already have, and do they have to just make sure they fit it in somehow so their evaluation is not affected?
Of course we must keep up the quality of our teaching, and solid teacher training is part of that. But it is crazy to oblige employees to follow such extensive training without giving them the time to do so. Well, crazy? For WUR it’s a fantastic deal if people do this on top of their regular work. But it’s not quite such a fantastic deal for the individual lecturer.
Guido Camps (38) is a vet and a researcher at Human Nutrition and OnePlanet. He enjoys baking, beekeeping and unusual animals.
