PDRAs teaching duties #

Research PDRAs are expected to contribute to the teaching in the department. This provides important experience expected for academic and research careers.

Typical duties for PDRAs #

PDRAs are normally given a choice of what activities they would like to contribute to, and the department tries to accommodate them as much as possible. The list below is a short description of the typical activities that can be taken on by PDRAs.

L1 tutorials #

L1 tutorials are sessions where a group of 5-6 students solve problems related to the Foundations of Physics lecture courses (these courses provide an introduction to Classical Mechanics, Oscillations and Waves, Optics, Electromagnetism, Circuits, Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics). The sessions are led by a PDRA, a PhD student or a member of staff. They run weekly during term time (9 sessions in Michaelmas term, 10 sessions in Epiphany term and one session in Easter term). Tutors also need to provide feedback on weekly homework and other assignments and report absences of students in their group(s). They receive comprehensive solutions to the problems set as homework or as questions for discussion in tutorials and a copy of the textbook followed by the course lecturers.

L1 laboratory demonstration #

Level 1 laboratories are run in the afternoons (and a Wednesday morning) during term time. PDRAs are typically asked to demonstrate one three-hour session per week during one term (9 afternoons in either Michaelmas or Epiphany term); each term also includes associated marking of laboratory reports from an experiment demonstrated. The L1 labs cover simple experiments for which no specialist knowledge is required. All relevant training is provided before teaching, with support from the Laboratory Leadership Team.

Workshop leader #

Workshops are one-hour sessions where a relatively large set of students (30-50) solve problems to support the material taught in their lectures. Usually the workshop for a given lecture are lead by the lecturer, but in some cases a PDRA can be the workshop leader instead. Depending on the course workshops can have 1 to 4 sessions per week (where the same problems are solved by a different group of students). The responsibility of the workshop leader is to coordinate the PhD demonstrators for the sessions and liaise with the lecturer regarding common issues students encounter during the problem sessions or common misconceptions. Some courses also have a progress test for which there may be some marking to do. In some courses the workshop leader can be involved in the devising of the problems.

Workload allocation #

The department uses SWAP to keep track of the teaching load of staff, including PDRAs.

In the current accounting system the expected load for PDRAs is around 80 credits.