Harry van de Wouw, a teacher of didactic schooling: “At TU/e it is not yet obligatory to possess the BKO certificate. At this moment it is being tested within two Departments: Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences and Chemical Engineering. All newly appointed teachers or those who wish to move up from junior lecturer 2 (UD 2) to UD 1 or to senior lecturer (UHD) are obliged to have or obtain a BKO certificate. “They have two years to obtain it after having been appointed”, Van de Wouw explains.

The BKO certificate is issued by the 3TU Graduate School. “Whether a lecturer qualifies for this or not is assessed by a Departmental portfolio committee”, says Van de Wouw. This committee assesses the lecturer’s portfolio, which should contain material evidencing that he or she disposes of the necessary skills. There are lecturers who have such a wealth of experience that they can easily compile a portfolio demonstrating that they can design a course, compose an examination and so on. This they then submit to the committee, which assesses it and subsequently issues a certificate to the lecturer.

For lecturers with less experience the Personnel and Organization Department (DPO) provides courses or an educational method comprising all the aspects that are required to obtain the BKO certificate.

No obligations
Van de Wouw: “There are no obligations. We offer a comprehensive package and candidates can select the items they want. It is up to the lecturers themselves to see whether they have enough baggage to fill the portfolio.”

One of the courses of this method that may also be followed separately is Course design, a workshop in which participants systematically design a course. The workshop leader gives individual feedback and participants get feedback from each other.

According to Van de Wouw special attention is devoted to the course in the sense that no subject is offered independently; rather, they all form building blocks within a curriculum. “If you draw up the learning objectives for a course, it is good to attune these with colleagues and to see how these objectives relate to other Bachelor or Master subjects.”

“The second point of attention is that designing a course does not really differ from designing an apparatus, or designing something or other. You do not achieve that by just sitting down and waiting for inspiration. You have to work on it systematically. You do so with anything you design, so why not in teaching?”, Van de Wouw concludes./.