Overview
Course Numbers and Level
Adding
Revising (and important deadlines!)
Dropping
Cross-listing (cross-referencing and important deadlines)
Co-existing
Before a course may be added to the MyUI Schedule of Courses using the Offerings Planner, the course first must exist in the MAUI Course Library.
Forms to add, revise, or drop a course move via workflow from the departmental or program initiator to the DEO, who must approve the request; the system then sends the form to the College for approval. Courses numbered through 4999 and below follow a workflow path ending with the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education, who reviews these requests. Courses above 4999 are sent to and are reviewed by the Associate Dean for Graduate Education.
Once this workflow process is completed, an automated email is sent to the initiator noting the completion of the request and the course may be scheduled through the Offerings Planner by the department or program. A notice is also generated if anyone on the workflow route makes a change to the form's content.
Scheduling of courses once in the Course Library is handled by the administrative home of the course using the Offerings Planner.
The same process is used for revising or dropping a course, but the corresponding workflow form must be chosen (add, revise, or drop).
Students who have not completed a prerequisite as stated on the course prerequisite field are automatically blocked at the time of registration from enrolling in a course. The following describes the general level of the UI numbering system for courses.
All courses below 5000 are undergraduate offerings; 5000 and over is reserved for graduate courses.
- Courses under 1000 are considered remedial, and students do not earn credit for completing them.
- Most elementary courses are numbered 1000-1999. An elementary course is broad and introductory while being highly structured with a focus on skills and using multiple means of assessing student work. Most General Education CLAS Core courses are in this category.
- An intermediate course is generally numbered 1999-2999 and is considered best suited for second-year students. Some GE courses are also in this category.
- 3000-3999 indicates intermediate to advanced offerings.
- An advanced course is numbered 4000-4999 and focuses on a more specialized topic or a specific area of knowledge within a discipline.
Any revisions to a course must be completed before the MyUI schedule is published for the semester or session when the course change is effective. Forms should be completed and through the workflow path before the MyUI schedule's publication date, a process taking several days once received by the College.
Revisions implemented after the publication date of the MyUI schedule interfere with the student Schedule Builder and with final exam scheduling and exam room assignments and cannot be approved by the College.
Please see the Registrar's Academic Calendar for specific dates for each semester or session; also visit the Offerings Planner since publication of the MyUI Schedule is noted there.
Adding a Course: Deadline
- Requests to create a new course may be made at any time but may take two weeks or more to process.
- The course approval form to add a course should be submitted via MAUI course workflow as soon as feasible. Once a course is approved and entered, it is up the department to add it to the Offerings Planner in order to have it appear on the MyUI schedule.
- All new courses must include a rationale, explaining why the course should be added. This is a requirement and a new course cannot be approved without a clear and compelling rationale. View Guidelines for New Courses.
- All courses must include a short course description suitable for the General Catalog; please view these Catalog description guidelines.
- A second MyUI description must be entered for EVERY course through the Offerings Planner. CLAS requires that all courses have these TWO descriptions.
- When creating a new course, please remember that four-digit numbers of previous, discontinued courses may not be reused.
- Choose numbers carefully. Generally,1000-level courses are for first-year students; 2000 level are for first and second-year students; 3000-4000 are generally courses for third and fourth-year students. Some disciplines use very strict sequential numbering to indicate the intended audience of the courses; others do not.
- Courses under 1000 are not credit-bearing and do not count toward graduation.
- Approval of the course by the College and its inclusion in the Course Library does not mean resources have been allocated for its instruction in any one semester. Requesting funding is a separate process; any questions should be referred to the administrative home of the course. Departments with funding questions should ask the appropriate associate dean.
- Topic courses may be used for special opportunities (e.g., visiting faculty) to avoid the need to have new courses approved frequently or at the last minute. Topics course should be designated as repeatable for credit and with the course content and subtitle thus changed each time the course is offered.
Courses may be dropped at any time as long the course is not offered for the semester or session when the course will be dropped.
- Courses may be dropped through the course approval workflow process.
- Each fall, the Registrar also prepares a list of "inactive" courses that have not been taught in the last four years. The College asks departments either to discontinue these courses or to justify their continuance through a workflow process. CLAS reviews all submitted inactive forms.
- Once a course is dropped, that dropped number cannot be reused. The number is "retired."
- Departments may cross-list (also known as cross-reference) a course so it appears under each department's offerings.
- Courses are never cross-listed with a second actual pre-existing course. Instead, cross-listing is a way to have a course appear on the MyUI schedule or the student's degree audit under a second acronym and number.
- Sometimes identical course numbers are impossible to use for cross-listing since one department has already used the number and numbers are never reused. In these cases, the numbers should be as close as possible and at least must be at the same level (such at the 1000 level or 2000 level etc).
- The administrative home of the course is responsible for requesting the cross-referencing and sending it through workflow.
- The administrative home of the course should speak with the concerned department or other units before submitting a request to cross-list a course.
- Cross-listing is allowed among more than two departments as long as each unit has agreed to the cross-listing.
- Cross-listings cannot be added or removed once the MyUI schedule is published. Please send forms before the schedule's publication. See this page for dates: https://www.maui.uiowa.edu/maui/registrar/courses/planner/dashboard.page.
- Two separate but related courses offered on the same days, at the same times, and in the same room taught by the same instructor are considered co-existing courses.
- That is, two courses with different numbers and titles are offered to one audience when the content and learning outcomes for both offerings can be sufficiently met.
- Generally, co-existing courses are focused on a topic suitable for both undergraduates and graduate students with significant overlap existing and thus allowing the two courses to be listed as co-existing.
- Each course is required to have a separate syllabus with appropriate policies and assignments for each population. That is, the two audiences must have different work and grading systems.
- Students must understand that these different standards and assignments apply to each course.
- To offer a co-existing course, permission must be sought first from the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education.