Experiences with the implementation of a national teaching qualification in university medical centres and veterinary medicine in the Netherlands

Abstract

In 2008, a compulsory national basic teaching qualification was introduced for all university teachers in the Netherlands. At that time all eight University Medical Centres (UMCs) and the only Faculty of Veterinary Medicine had adopted or were setting up teacher development programmes. This study explores how these programmes relate to each other and to the basic teaching qualification. To gather information on teacher development programmes in the UMCs and the Veterinary Medicine Faculty an online survey was filled out by teacher development representatives from each of them. The programmes had main features in common (e.g. competency based and portfolio assessment), but differed somewhat in contents according to the local situation. Importantly, they had all been formally accepted as equivalent to the basic teaching qualification. We consider the freedom to tailor the qualifications to the medical context as well as to the local situation of the UMCs and the Veterinary Medicine Faculty one of the major success factors and the well-established collaboration between teacher development representatives of the UMCs and the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine as another. Challenges for the future include embedding the teacher development programmes in the institutional organizations and maintaining and further developing the programmes and the competencies of the qualified teachers, e.g. in a senior qualification.