How to add a new course

Enter a course you already offer, or propose a new one and send it through approval.

8 min read · For: Curriculum developers and institution admins

Courses → Add course opens one long form. You can save it as a draft at any point and come back; nothing is submitted until you say so. Where a field needs explaining, an (i) beside its name opens the explanation — on hover, on focus or on a tap — rather than crowding the form with it.

Filling in the form

1. Course detailsHow the course appears in the catalog: code, name and description, academic level, the academic unit it belongs to, and the effective date — the first term this version applies to.
2. ProgramsChoose every program that uses this course from the picker. This matters beyond bookkeeping: the learning outcomes of those programs become the ones you can link your course outcomes to.
3. RequisitesWhat a student needs before, or alongside, this course, and the courses that count for it. These print in the calendar and are what the catalog shows students.
4. Course learning outcomesWrite each as something a student can do. Under each outcome, tick the program outcomes it supports — those come from the programs you selected above.
5. Credits, hours and gradingWhat the registrar and the calendar print: credits, contact hours, self-study hours, grading basis and scheme, the passing grade, and whether the course repeats. Contact hours are counted either in total or per week — most institutions say “45 hours” rather than “3 hours a week”, so a new course starts on In total, with the number of weeks beside it. Each kind of instruction has its own box — lecture, seminar, tutorial, lab, field experience, other and online — and they add up to the total. The hours here are the standard; a delivery mode can set its own.
6. Course contentWhat the course outline sets out for students: topics, assessment, required readings and materials, learning activities, equipment and software, and supplementary resources.
7. Delivery modesEvery way the course is offered — on campus, hybrid, fully online, or whatever your institution calls them. Your institution marks one as its default, and a new course starts with that one ticked: what you filled in above is that mode’s. Tick another where the course is also offered that way, and the mode records only what differs — its hours, assessments, materials, approach and weekly schedule.
8. Standards and skillsHow the course meets the degree standards, the skills it develops, course attributes, and anything an outside body requires, including prior learning assessment.
9. Syllabus policiesStandard wording printed on the syllabus. It is written once in Settings and chosen here, so the same policy reads the same way on every course.
10. Other information and other detailsAnything else the outline or syllabus should say, plus any fields your institution has added of its own under Settings → Courses and syllabi.

Submitting it

• Save as draft keeps it private to people who can edit curriculum. Nobody is notified.
• Submit for approval starts the course approval process at level 1 and emails the person responsible for that level.
• While it is in review the course page shows how far it has gone and who it is waiting on, and the form is read-only. If something is wrong, the reviewer sends it back to you.

The course page afterwards

The tabs

Course is the record itself. CLO–PLO map shows where this course sits in each program’s map. Versions lists every approved version. Activity log is everything that has happened to it.

Outline and Syllabus

Print-ready documents built from the record — the course outline as approved, and the syllabus for a section. The selector beside them chooses which delivery mode you are looking at.

Propose revision

Starts a new version through the approval process. The approved version stays in effect until the revision is approved.

Correct without revision

For institution admins and plain errors only. It saves straight to the current version, asks for a reason, and is recorded in the log and in version history.

Retire course

Sends a retirement request through its own approval process.