New course outline guidelines
Published: December 2023 | Updated: April 10, 2025
At its December 2023 meeting, Senate approved revisions to the Course Outline requirements for the undergraduate and graduate academic calendars, effective May 1, 2024.
The approved revisions are intended to:
- Provide instructors with detailed information on what should be included in a course outline,
- Provide students with consistency in course outlines across academic units,
- Provide students with certainty with respect to expectations and learning outcomes, and
- Reduce workload for instructors.
What is a course outline and when is it required?
Course outlines are required for all courses except pro-forma courses (e.g., independent studies, directed research, etc.), Masters Thesis, Doctoral Candidacy and Doctoral Dissertations.
Course outlines communicate to students what they can expect in the course and provide helpful resources to support students’ learning and wellbeing. At the beginning of each course, instructors are responsible for providing their students with a written course outline that includes adequate information.
It is important for course outlines to provide consistent information across academic units and for unit leaders to be able to review and ensure all outlines for courses offered by the academic unit include the necessary information about the course and available resources.
Academic units may adopt discipline- or unit-specific course outline templates that include the baseline information and resources, and other relevant information as appropriate.
In addition to course information, teaching modalities, learning outcomes and assessment methods, course outlines should include Territory acknowledgement. As well, instructors are encouraged to adopt inclusive and in developing courses where appropriate. Details are available in the undergraduate and graduate academic calendars.
Implementation of the course outline regulationÂ
New Course Outlines Management Tool
The university is developing a new course outlines management tool that will provide a consistent student experience and assist instructors in their course planning. This new tool is integrated with Brightspace and will allow for pre-populated fields (from the template and Banner), leaving instructors to only customize certain information such as course materials, assessments, etc., while promoting consistency in course outline formats for students. This is a collaborative project between Learning and Teaching Support and Innovation (LTSI) and University Systems.
Development of the new tool has been underway since June 2024. The first phase involved extensive online and in-person user acceptance testing (UAT) with volunteer academic units.
The next phase will involve testing additional accessibility enhancements aligned with current accessibility standards as well as developing specific use cases unique to academic areas. We will be targeting a limited rollout of the new Course Outlines Management Tool for the Fall 2025 term.
To ensure we develop a tool that meets the needs of our community, we are seeking volunteers with experience working with course outlines (editing, reviewing, approving, coordinating, etc.) to complete software tests and attend in-person sessions to demonstrate new features, gather your feedback, and discuss your specific requirements. The time commitment is 2-4 hours per month between May and September 2025. If you are interested in participating in the next phase of UAT, .
In the meantime, instructors will need to continue to submit electronic copies of course outlines for every course to their Chair/Director (or Associate Dean in non-departmentalized faculties) for review as the current Brightspace settings do not support academic leaders having direct access or the ability of instructors to automatically forward course outlines to others from Brightspace.
Resources for instructors
Originally published February 27, 2024