Some PhD and post-doctoral fellowships at LTG include a certain proportion of 'obligatory work duties', i.e. the expectation for the fellow to contribute to tasks at the group or department that transcend the individual research project. The most common such tasks are related to teaching, but in principle any academic work that benefits the research group or department at large can be considered work duties.

The standard duration for a PhD in Norway (at present) is considered three years. Many PhD fellows have an employment contract for four years, however, which means that their engagement includes 25 percent obligatory work duties. Seeing that a full working year is considered the equivalent of around 1700 hours, the department recommends that fellows with 25 percent work duties contibute, on average, around 410 hours per year. Where possible, it may be desirable to plan on a slightly higher obligatory work load in earlier years, so as to keep non-PhD work to a minimum towards the end of the fellowship.

The assignment of work duties, ideally, should be by mutual agreement, i.e. the research group and fellows should seek to align requirements, interests, and capabilities, in order to make the best possible use of resources. Unless otherwise agreed at the time of appointment, fellows have a 'right' to use a large part of their work duties on teaching, i.e. gaining experience in the design and implementation of university coursework is considered a valuable qualification. Each fellow is responsible for their own bookkeeping and reporting of hours (e.g. annually to the Faculty).

Taking as our point of departure (a) a set of recommendations by the department (apparently dating back to around 1999) and (b) the terms of payment for student laboratory assistants, LTG permanent staff in early 2012 landed on the following guidelines for hourly accounting of work duties. These guidelines are intended to both avoid under-reporting and over-engagement, but may of course be subject to review and invididual adjustments (in a dialogue with group management).

Teaching a course is assumed to take up to six hours per lecture hour, e.g. up to 192 hours for a class that has two lecture hours per week over 16 weeks (which would be the default in the spring term). While there is no principle against it, for a PhD fellow to teach a full class by themselves is not the most common case; when co-teaching with others, the above numbers would be pro-rated proportionally to the actual number of lectures taught.

It should ordinarily not be the case that a fellows needs to design a class from scratch, including preparation of wholly new teaching materials. Where this might be required, nevertheless, teaching credit can be increased by up to 25 per cent. For example, should a fellow teach half of a completely new class (i.e. eight weeks with two lecture hours each, say), they could be credited for an additional 24 hours.

Taking the responsibility for laboratories (gruppe) is another common form of involving fellows in teaching. Here, the accounting of hours should by and large follow the standards set by the department when hiring students as laboratory assistants. It can be helpful to distinguish two types of laboratory-related activities: (a) preparing and running the actucal (face-to-face) laboratory sessions and (b) assessing and grading submissions by students (i.e. obligatory assignments or homework projects).

For laboratory hours, we propose a multiplication factor of three. For example, teaching 15 laboratories of two hours each (where, as in teaching, a block of fourty-five minutes qualifies as one hour) would be credited as 90 hours. However, a fellow might have the responsibility for multiple laboratory groups of the same course in the same term, say in one of the larger LTG courses like INF1820 or INF2810. Seeing that running through the same material (typically in the same week) multiple times does not call for much additional preparatory work, the proposed multiplication factor for secondary laboratory hours is 1.5. Thus, leading two two-hour laboratories over 15 weeks would result in a total credit of 135 hours.

The second element of laboratory assistance, assessment of student submissions, is a little harder to capture quantitatively. Again, the general principle should be parallelism to what student laboratory assistants would be paid for their service (in proportion to the hourly rates offered to students for core laboratory hours). Traditionally, obligatory assignments are broken down into three categories, small, medium, and large, where the expectation is that evaluating a small submission can be done in about half an hour, whereas a large submission may take around one hour.

In INF2820, for example, we have had six submissions throughout the semester in recent years, where technically each pair of submissions (i.e. (1a) and (1b), (2a) and (2b), and (3a) and (3b)) constitutes one of three obligatory assignments that students need to pass to qualify for the exam. For this example, all six submissions are estimated to be in the small category. Thus, if a total of 162, say, INF2820 submissions were evaluated in the course of a semester, the credit for assessing these and providing feedback to students could be around 81 hours.

The classification of assignments (and thus student submissions) into the above categories, ultimately, should be performed by the LTG staff teaching the course (in consultation with laboratory assistants, of course). Furthermore, the specific system used for one course should stabilize throughout the years, unless of course there are (non-trivial) revisions in the assignments (or unexpected discoveries).

Finally, fellows can assist in the grading of student exams, where they should keep track of the actual hours used.

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