Practical affairs

Download the annual plan per quarter here.

A teaching capacity plan for a course details the names of the lecturers and the educational activities and the corresponding number of hours per lecturer per week. This must all be within the number of hours available for the course.

The OPSIO model is used to determine the number of hours to be allocated to each course. This model calculates the number of teaching hours available for a course based on the number of ECTS, the number of students and the teaching and assessment methods. The course coordinator draws up a staff teaching plan based on the total number of hours.

These plans for each course are then used to create an overview for the faculty. This allows the faculty to check whether the courses’ needs match the availability of faculty staff.

In June, a preliminary plan for the whole year is drawn up, which is based on forecasts of student numbers.

The departments are responsible for supplying and completing the teaching capacity plans. The initial coordination of staffing therefore takes place between the course coordinator and the department secretaries. All information regarding staff teaching plans is then combined in the faculty-wide teaching capacity plan. If it emerges that there is insufficient internal capacity for a course, solutions such as hiring temporary lecturers or secondments will be considered. To ensure compliance with the relevant guidelines and conditions, this is coordinated through the E&SA department. E&SA sends course coordinators an email to initiate this process (in June).

In the second or third week after the start of the course, you will receive an email asking you to confirm the number of students actually taking the course. This information is then used to adjust the total number of hours and to finalise the teaching capacity plan. This will take place around week 5 of the course.

For more information, please contact onderwijsplanning-io@tudelft.nl.

Students and lecturers can view the timetable in My Timetable.

The faculty’s timetable assistant is responsible for creating the timetable. One timetable is compiled per semester. Around four to five months before the start of the semester, the faculty’s timetable assistant will contact the course coordinators to request information about contact moments, types of educational activities and wishes regarding the required facilities. Once all input has been received, the timetable assistant starts by comparing the wishes with the guidelines of the relevant curriculum. The input is then processed into a draft timetable, which is submitted to the course coordinator for verification. The definitive tameable for each semester is published around 1 December and 1 June, respectively.

Contact: Roosters-IO@tudelft.nl

For more information about timetables, the academic calendar and locations, see:

• Timetables 
• Academic Calendar
• Education rooms
• Locations en Plans
• Abbreviations rooms and locations

In most of the faculty’s courses, the course coordinator is assisted by a team of lecturers to teach the course.

Lecturers are appointed by the director of studies, on the recommendation of the course coordinator and in consultation with the departmental directors.

The course coordinator is responsible for the design and provision of a course, but will often ask several lecturers in their team to contribute ideas and to help with course development (the core team). Lecturers perform their teaching duties within the frameworks that have been developed for the course.

Depending on their personal knowledge and skills and on the type of teaching, lecturers fulfill one or more of the following roles/positions within a course:

• Educational developer: This involves developing and implementing (part of) a course or curriculum.
• Expert: This involves playing an active role in student supervision (either individual students or groups of students) regarding specific fields, by transferring knowledge, outlining required reading, making connections and demonstrating application possibilities within professional practice.
• Coach: This involves supervising the learning process of individual students or groups of students by stimulating them to complete tasks and assignments proactively and independently and by giving advice and feedback on learning results.
• Assessor: This involves designing exams and modes of assessment, conducting formative and/or summative assessments of the delivered final result and/or the demonstrated learning process and/or providing feedback on this assessment to the student.

Lecturers of a course can fulfill one or more of these roles. It is important that the students are aware of who is responsible for which role(s) in a particular course.

Registering for courses

The Faculty of IDE has a registration system for courses. Only students who have registered can participate in courses.

The faculty uses a registration system so that it can:

• effectively match teaching space to the number of participating students;
• ensure there are enough staff to teach the course;
• arrange sufficient business cases, if applicable;
• check that students satisfy the admission requirements for a course or programme, if applicable.
• ensure that the course is organised properly, e.g., create groups.

The E&SA department is responsible for the course registration process on behalf of the director of education. Once the participant lists for the courses are ready and on Brightspace, the course coordinators are informed.

As a course coordinator, it is important that you:

• only let students participate in the course who are on the list of participants on Brightspace;
• forward students’ requests to participate in the course directly to the teaching coordinator (coe-ide@tudelft.nl) with a request to follow-up on the email. If requested, reply to the student to inform them that their email has been forwarded, but do not comment on the substance of the request or indicate whether there are any places available. By handling all questions regarding course participation via a single channel, we can ensure that students are treated equally.
• keep in mind that students can deregister from the course. We therefore suggest that you create the groups at the last possible moment/one week before the start of the course;
• If a student deregisters from the course, they can usually do this themselves in MyTUDelft. They are then no longer visible in Brightspace. If they have not deregistered themselves, please inform IDE CS or send an email to coe-ide@tudelft.nl. They will make sure the student is removed from the list of participants in Osiris and therefore also from the course on Brightspace.

Information for students on how to register for courses is available here.

Registering for exams
Does your course include an examination? Then students must register for that examination in good time. The number of registrations for examinations is used to allocate examination rooms and to divide the students among these rooms.

Students can register for an examination from 56 days prior to the examination to no later than six calendar days prior to the examination.

As course coordinator, it is advisable to remind students to register for the examination halfway through the course and a few days before the deadline via a Brightspace announcement. This also applies to resits. The Exam Desk will notify you of the list of participants for the examination. Some students with a disability, such as dyslexia, may receive additional examination time. These students are indicated in the list of participants with the note ‘VTT’ (extra time for examinations). The amount of extra time permitted is 10 minutes per hour of examination.

For more information about examinations, your tasks as a course coordinator and those of the invigilators during the examination, what students need to bring to an examination, how to deal with students who are late or not on your participant list etc., click here.

Assessment components in Osiris
To be able to register marks in Osiris, the assessment components of a course must be entered in Osiris well before the start of the academic year. This assessment information comprises:

1. Summative tests used in a course plus a brief description of the test that is clearly recognisable to students (e.g., examination, project, LCA laboratory course, presentation, essay, etc.).
2. For each test, whether a mark or a pass/fail will be awarded.
3. In the case of a test for which a mark is awarded: the weighting of the test.

Once the course description for CourseBase has been finalised, the assessment information for a course cannot be changed.

Requirements for assigning marks
It is important that the marks meet the requirements laid down in the Teaching Regulations (see Article 15 RRvE BSc and Article 16 RRvE MSc).

Publishing results from individual course components on Brightspace
Brightspace features a Gradebook for publishing partial marks. As a consequence of the GDPR, partial marks may only be published via this Gradebook.
The advantage of Gradebook is that the lecturers who teach the course can enter their students’ marks themselves. As course coordinator, you can therefore closely monitor:

1. The marks awarded by the various lecturers
2. Whether lecturers publish the marks in good time

Entering marks
The course coordinator is responsible for ensuring that marks are entered correctly.
For instructions on how to enter marks in Osiris, visit this page; here you will find a range of helpful manuals.
For BSc courses, you may request support from IDE CS. MSc course coordinators can contact coe-ide@tudelft.nl for help.

Result date
When entering marks in Osiris, it is important that you enter the correct result date. The result date is the date on which the student sat the examination/submitted the work, i.e., the date of the examination, the deadline for a report or the date on which they completed a practical. The result date is NOT the date on which you enter the marks.

What is fraud?
According to the RRvE, fraud is taken to mean any act or omission by a student that makes it fully or partially impossible to properly assess the knowledge, insight and skill of that student or another student. Fraud is in any event understood to include the committing of plagiarism in any form, including all cases in which a student implies that the work in question is their own when that is not the case, including copying the work of others and presenting it as one’s own through deliberate deception or through carelessness and/or inadequate references. Fraud is also defined as including the following:

• being in possession, during an examination, of aids (digital or otherwise), such as: any notes, pre-programmed calculator, mobile phone, book, syllabus, notes in books for an open-book examination, the use of which has not been expressly permitted;
• looking at the work of others during an examination or exchanging information in any way inside or outside the room where the examination is taking place;
• impersonating someone else during an examination or being represented by someone else at an examination;
• being in possession of the questions/assignments of an examination before the date or time on which the examination is due to be held;
• inventing and/or falsifying survey answers, interview answers or research data.

Plagiarism scanner for written assignments
The Board of Examiners assumes that lecturers check all written assignments for plagiarism. A plagiarism scanner (Ouriginal) is available via Brightspace. On the Brightspace Support website, you will find a manual explaining how to use the plagiarism scanner.

What to do if you suspect fraud?
In the event of a suspected case of fraud or plagiarism, the lecturer must:

• inform the student of their suspicion and make clear that the course coordinator will also inform the Board of Examiners;
• inform the Board of Examiners of their suspicion as soon as possible (by sending an email to educationregulations-ide@tudelft.nl), stating the grounds and providing all relevant evidence. The lecturer must not award a mark to the student for the (part of the) course to which the suspicion relates pending the Board of Examiners’ investigation of the matter.

The Board of Examiners will investigate the suspicion and the student will be given the opportunity to submit their views. If the student is found to have committed fraud, a sanction will be imposed (for possible sanctions, see Article 8.9 RRvE BSc and 8.9 RRvE MSc). The lecturer and course coordinator will be informed in writing of the Board of Examiners’ decision.

Contact: educationregulations-ide@tudelft.nl

Quality assurance activities
The faculty is committed to offering high-quality education. For this reason, quality assurance activities are carried out. The Quality Assurance sub-division of the E&SA department is responsible for this, acting on behalf of the Board of Education.

The IDE Quality Assurance Manual (Handboek Kwaliteitszorg IO) outlines the quality cycle that IDE uses for its Bachelor’s and Master’s degree programmes. This involves a series of successive, coherent activities (based on the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle) that allow the faculty to systematically monitor the quality of education and, if necessary, take steps to improve it. For example, courses are evaluated every two to three years, semester evaluations are performed, investigations are carried out to determine the quality of the first year of the Bachelor’s degree programme and alumni surveys are conducted. Every year in September, an activity plan is drawn up in which the timetable for evaluation activities is determined by the Board of Education.

Quality of the courses
When a course is coming up for evaluation, the course coordinator is contacted around the second week of the course. A standard questionnaire is used for teaching evaluations, to which the course coordinator can add their own, course-specific questions.

In consultation with the course coordinator, the standard questionnaire is adapted to the teaching and assessment methods used in the course. This questionnaire can be distributed among students either digitally or on paper. In the case of online questionnaires, in week 8 the course coordinator is asked to supply a list of participating students. In the case of paper questionnaires, these are handed out to students during the final session of the course or after the assessment. The course coordinator is then responsible for ensuring that the completed evaluations are delivered to Quality Assurance.

Once the results have been processed, they will be discussed with the course coordinator so that any improvement measures can be agreed. The course coordinator is expected to share the evaluation results with the rest of the staff. The course coordinator is the owner of the raw results. A summary of the evaluation plus the course coordinator’s response/plan of action is then put on the agenda of the Board of Education’s meeting for approval. Following that, the summary is published on Brightspace. This way, students receive feedback on their input.

The course coordinator may also request a course evaluation by sending an email to evaluatie-IO@tudelft.nl. This should be done in time, i.e. within the first two weeks of the start of the course.

In addition to the evaluations organised by Quality Assurance, ID Education – comprising students from the FSC and the OKIO – also carries out annual evaluations, both with and without the participation of the lecturer.

Quality of assessments
The Board of Examiners is responsible for monitoring the quality of assessments. The Board of Examiners reviews the constructive alignment (under 'structuring a course') and the individual tests within each course once every four years. More information about this procedure can be found here. Further information:

• Brief description of the quality assurance system
• The IDE Quality Assurance Manual (Handboek Kwaliteitszorg IO) can be requested from the faculty’s teaching advisor: evaluatie-io@tudelft.nl
• All course evaluations (and an archive of old evaluations) can be found in the ‘Evaluations TUD’ section in Brightspace via brightspace.tudelft.nl. If you do not have access to the ‘Evaluations TUD’ section, you can also ‘enrol’ via the Brightspace catalogue.

In 2009, TU Delft introduced the policy that every staff member with teaching duties must hold a UTQ (or equivalent).

The following applies to new staff members who do not possess a teaching qualification:

• Staff members with extensive teaching experience can apply for a partial or full exemption from the UTQ within three months of commencing employment. This requires the submission of a teaching portfolio (template can be requested from E.D.Bos@tudelft.nl).
• The UTQ must be obtained within three years of their appointment.

The UTQ programme comprises four modules: Develop, Teach, Asses and Supervise.

From 2018 onwards, newly appointed course coordinators must meet the requirements for the UTQ certificate. The Board of Education verifies whether a prospective course coordinator meets this requirement.

You can find more information about the UTQ here.

The faculty feels it is important that students also encounter realistic practical cases during their studies. To facilitate this, a number of courses collaborate with external parties who provide an assignment that students work on.

If you would like to involve an external party as a client for the students taking your course, first consult the relevant director of education to determine whether this is compatible with the overall program.

More information on collaborating with external parties can be found here.

A list of courses that collaborate with companies can be found here: Student projects
If you have any questions, contact Michelle Nahumury at the IDE Valorisation department.