Please contact Exams & Timetabling (ETT) at ett@ualberta.ca if you have any questions regarding course changes.
A course must have the following components:
Subject & Number - a valid course designator (e.g. NS, MATH, etc.) and a valid course number.
Title - should be brief and general. Please note that any title exceeding 30 characters in length, including spaces, will appear in full in the Calendar but will always appear in an abbreviated form to students in Bear Tracks and on transcripts, due to a strict character limit in Campus Solutions.
Course Career - either Undergraduate or Graduate
Units - the quantity of units the student will earn (commonly 3, 6, etc.). Certain courses may have variable units which are indicated with a hyphen (e.g. 3-9, etc.).
Approved Hours - the distribution of hours a student may expect for the course, commonly in a format indicating the ratio of lectures, seminars, labs, etc. per week (e.g. 3-0-3 represents 3 lecture hours and 3 lab hours per week). Certain courses (such as clinical courses) may instead indicate the sum total of hours for the course (e.g. 138 hours).
Fee Index - the fee index is typically 2x the number of units, with some specific exceptions.
Faculty - primary faculty owning the course.
Department - primary department owning the course. Non-departmentalized faculties will insert their faculty name here.
Typically Offered - an indication to students of when the course may be available, using phrases such as First Term, Second Term, Either Term, Spring/Summer, etc. This field is editorial, and may be changed in concert with Exams & Timetabling without prior governance approval.
Course Description - a concise description of the course objectives or content and any pre/corequisites or course restrictions. The course description should not include references to the modality of the course (e.g. online, in-person, etc) or the assessment requirements of the course (e.g. Students will be assessed on in-person attendance and completion of a written essay and oral examination, etc.). Additional descriptive elements and all assessment information should be put into the course syllabus.
Course subject names (e.g., ‘English’ or ‘Biology’) should designate broad areas of study, often across an entire department. It is not appropriate to choose different names for specializations within a broad discipline (e.g., ‘Literature’, ‘Composition’, ‘Literary Analysis’, etc.).
All course designators must be no longer than 5 characters in length (including letters and spaces).
When creating a course, complete the course template (see Course Components above). The course number selected must be either an unused number or a number retired for at least five years and not in use in any Calendar entry or course description.
When deleting a course, check whether it is used in any other program or as a pre/corequisite in any other course as those may also require formal changes. Course deletion proposals from other faculties should be reviewed for impacts on your own courses and program requirements. ETT (ett@ualberta.ca) or Calendar (calendar@ualberta.ca) can assist in searching for pre/corequisite courses.
Course renaming or renumbering should only be done under special circumstances. Please consider the potential impact to students:
Program planning and registration may be difficult to navigate independently as students try to track courses that have changed
Students may have to register in a course with the same number twice because renumbering has attached different content to a required course
Students may inadvertently take two courses with different numbers and names but the same content, and cannot get credit for both
Students may have difficulty with transfer credit to other programs or institutions if the course level changes
Please also note that additional maintenance will be required in the course listing, program area, and course restrictions with the implementation of pre/corequisite checking.
In general, course renumbering and renaming should occur only when there are strong academic reasons for doing so. Such reasons would include restructuring/amalgamation that changes a department’s ability to offer the same configuration of courses as before or complete revisions to the content and structure of a Faculty’s courses and programs.
Renumbering/redesignating/renaming a course is considered a course change. Please do not attempt to delete the course and create a new one. Contact ETT (ett@ualberta.ca) if you have any questions.
When renumbering a course, the course number selected must be either an unused number or a number retired for at least five years and not in use in any Calendar entry or course description
If a course is redesignated/renumbered/renamed, a note should be added to the course description indicating that students will not receive credit if they have taken the former course, if applicable. This note must be removed before the retired course number can be reused.
Once a course is approved for redesignating/renaming/renumbering:
all references to that course will be updated automatically in all program pages throughout the Calendar. It is not necessary to submit program changes to reflect the course renumbering, unless you wish to remove or replace the course entirely.
all references to that course inside other courses’ descriptions and/or pre/corequisites will not automatically update. The faculty should reach out to ETT (ett@ualberta.ca) to plan an editorial update of all affected courses.
To add/remove/change a non-standard fee applied to a course, please contact RACF for assistance.
To add/remove/change a note regarding the non-standard fee in the course description, please contact ETT (ett@ualberta.ca) for assistance and standard wording.
The following course changes are considered editorial and do not require formal approval. Please contact ETT (ett@ualberta.ca) with editorial course change requests.
Note: Editorial changes will be completed as volume allows. It is not guaranteed that requests made in the months leading up to the Calendar publication will be processed before the publication in March.
Correcting spelling or punctuation errors
Correcting grammatical errors
Extending a list of pre/corequisites to include their designator (e.g. MATH 100, 101, or 102 becoming MATH 100, MATH 101, or MATH 102)
Updating the “Typically Offered” term field
The Course Catalog as found in Bear Tracks is the official course record and is considered to be the most accurate. These listings are updated by Exams and Timetabling in the Office of the Registrar after a change is approved through University Governance.
Course Listings can also be found in the University Calendar. These course listings are exported from Campus Solutions into the draft Calendar and published once per year. Any course changes occurring after publication will not be visible in the Calendar that year, but will be visible in Campus Solutions.
Catalogue@ualberta is an app coordinated by IST. This website pulls information from Campus Solutions. If any information is incorrect here, please check back again as the page is updated regularly. If it is still incorrect after a few business days, please contact IST directly.
The course change and new course designator templates can be found on the Calendar Guide home page.
Sample completed templates coming soon.