The costs of the university teaching qualification are clear, the benefits are not

The university teaching qualification (UTQ) is, in theory at least, a certificate of didactic competence. To obtain this certificate, you have to take a few courses and give a final presentation. The official study load for the entire programme is 160 hours. Since every lecturer has to obtain such a certificate , this costs the TU Delft a lot of money. On top of that, of course, there are the expenses involved in running the programme: salaries for lecturers and administrative staff, building maintenance, IT support, and so on. The costs are clear, the benefits are not.

You are not assessed on your didactic competence

I recently obtained such a UTQ myself, and I do not believe that it certifies anything. The first problem is that during the UTQ programme, you are not assessed on your didactic competence at all, but on your ability to produce all kinds of writings. It is, of course, possible that the two are correlated, but this has yet to be demonstrated.

This brings us to a second problem: there does not seem to have been any serious research into the effectiveness of the UTQ training programme. The only article I have found is a study at Wageningen University which shows that lecturers with a UTQ score slightly better on student evaluations than lecturers without one. This study did not take into account all kinds of possible confounders, such as the fact that lecturers with a limited teaching assignment do not have to obtain a UTQ.

The most obvious experiment – measuring student evaluations of new lecturers, having half of them follow the UTQ programme and half not, and measuring again after about five years – has, to my knowledge, never been carried out. (Of course, you can seriously question the use of student evaluations to measure the quality of a lecturer, but that aside.)

There is another problem with the UTQ training that I do not want to sweep under the rug: the content is nonsense. I have read an article that was cited in the training three times. Three times, the quality was appalling. If you have a strong stomach, I recommend reading The Power of Feedback yourself. Personally, I got to page three before the problems became too much for me.

What do I suggest as an alternative? Absolutely nothing

So, do I have nothing good to say about the UTQ? Well, no. But some of my colleagues do. For example, they enjoyed talking to lecturers from other faculties or seeing how they approach their lectures. But I have yet to meet the first person who thinks they have gained anything from all that writing.

So what do I propose as an alternative? First of all, I would like to make a case for a highly underrated option: absolutely nothing. If a measure yields less than it costs, doing nothing is better – especially in times of austerity.

Secondly, I would venture to suggest that there is much more to be learned from attending a colleague’s lecture, or vice versa from having a colleague visit, and then discussing the lecture afterwards, without any obligation.

Even if it yields nothing, at least the costs are low. Incidentally, I would like to add that the UTQ lecturers and organisers all seem to be nice people who want the best for the world. This makes it all the more regrettable that their time and talent is being wasted on such a dud.