Doctoral school plays matchmaker for students and staff
04 December 2009
Postgraduate students who would like to do some hourly-paid teaching and course leaders needing such help are being brought together by an online 'introduction service' called WouldLikeToTeach.
The brainchild of Richard Freeman, Programme Leader for Researcher Development at the Institute of Education London's Doctoral School, the WouldLikeToTeach website (www.wouldliketoteach.org) saw 350 doctoral students (and research staff) register their details in its first few weeks. The website is a free service to help those registering find hourly-paid teaching opportunities in Higher Education to help them with their career development. It is also free to course leaders who are looking for doctoral students (and research staff) with particular areas of expertise to help on their courses.
All doctoral students and research staff from the Bloomsbury Colleges (Birkbeck, Institute of Education, London Consortium, LSHTM, School of Pharmacy, RVC, SAS, SOAS and UCL) are invited to register. The website is being promoted to potential employers in London, such as Heads of Department and Course Leaders looking for people to teach on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. "Everyone wins," says Dr Freeman.
The current ad hoc system tends to exclude certain groups, he believes. This is because some very busy course leaders may offer such teaching opportunities to the most visible doctoral students. But this puts at a disadvantage those students who are less often present in the department due to being part-time or having caring responsibilities. This is a serious disadvantage when it comes to getting permanent lecturing jobs as they cannot tick the all-important box that says they have relevant teaching experience. He believes the website will help create a level playing field by making more opportunities available to those groups previously under-represented.
The Doctoral School hopes eventually to expand WouldLikeToTeach to cover the whole country, not just London.
One student wrote in: "The wouldliketoteach initiative is truly excellent - thank you very much indeed for putting this in place. I found that registering was very easy indeed.
"I have often wanted the opportunity to teach on courses - with this facility I may now get the chance."
Further information from Dr Richard Freeman (r.freeman@ioe.ac.uk).