Abstract:

The regulation of the new undergraduate programmes introduced the realization of an end-of-degree project as mandatory to complete graduation. In the case of University of Vigo, the tutor guidance tasks, the evaluation and its consequent qualification are part of the teaching commitment. Because of that, our university proceeded to take into account those tasks in the organizational teaching plan, and a teaching relief of 6 hours by each end-of-degree project tutor guided, for this academic year 2013-2014, was established.

Our personal perception, since the beginning of mandatory end-of-degree project in Physiotherapy Degree (2009-2010), was that the teaching commitment was significantly higher than the provided reliefs. That is why we had decided to collect information on the necessary time commitment to develop tutor guidance.

The objective of this study was to assess and present the time commitment implied in the tutor guidance of each end-of-degree project in the academic year of 2012-2013.

After the analysis of data according to each guided student, it was observed that the average time commitment on those tutor guidance tasks (time commitments on evaluation and qualification were not taken into account) were more than twice the teaching relief assigned to this task.
Given the present political and economic circumstances, particularly the improve in teaching hours to those teachers without research recognized experience, cuts in wages, smaller project fundings, … it would be necessary that teaching duties including end-of-degree project tutor guidance were evaluated in a more approximate way to reality, might encouraging teachers to be implicated with the tutor guidance tasks.

Keywords:

End-of-degree project, Workload, Teaching, Time management, Physiotherapy.