WUR Teaching rules

PhD candidate involvement in teaching activities is very likely of interest for both PhD candidates and their chair groups. Teaching experience can be very useful for PhD candidates to further develop and improve their teaching skills, especially if they have an interest in pursuing an academic career. Teaching activities include both practical course contributions and supervision of theses, more information on this below.

Important there is a difference between two categories of PhD candidates regarding teaching activities:

A.    PhD candidates employed by WUR

PhD candidates with an employee contract at Wageningen University & Research (WUR) are regarded as scientific staff members with research and teaching responsibilities and can therefore be asked to spend maximally 10% of their time on teaching activities at WUR. A chair group can make an appeal to an employed PhD candidate to spend more than 10% of their time on teaching activities. In those cases an extension of the employee contract is compulsory to compensate for the extra time.

B.    PhD candidates not employed by WUR

PhD candidates not employed by WUR do not have a formal authority relationship with WUR and therefore they cannot be asked by the chair group to take up teaching activities at WUR. However, if they want to develop their teaching skills, they are allowed to perform teaching activities and gain practical experience as part of their education and training programme. This should begin by the PhD candidate asking the chair group, not the chair group asking the PhD candidate.

How can you calculate your time spent on teaching?

Practical course or lecture teaching activities

The time spent on practical course assistance and teaching lectures consists of contact hours with students, preparation hours (which often happens before the course begins) and hours needed for marking exams or correcting reports. The total number of hours for each course must be discussed with the course coordinator.

Supervision of MSc and BSc theses and internships

PhD candidates regularly spend time on supervising BSc or MSc students on their theses of interships. Depending on the type of thesis the number of teaching activity hours by PhD candidates vary. In the table below you find the number of hours that you should use for your TSP. If the thesis is a blended form of lab and desk study, a corresponding ratio must be used to calculate the supervision hours.

Standard supervision hours of PhD candidates for BSc and MSc projects to be used for TSP
Hours, major thesis Hours, minor thesis Hours, BSc thesis Hours, internship
Lab 90 56 20 20
Desk 38 30 20 20