Creating, Revising, and Inactivating Courses

Current courses are viewable in the Course Catalog. Instructions on how to create, revise, and inactivate courses are below.

CourseLeaf CIM

The Office of the Registrar (OTR) and Administrative Systems implemented CourseLeaf CIM (pronounced like the name "Kim"), which is a course inventory and curriculum management platform, with customized online forms and automated workflows, designed to ensure accuracy across an institution’s courses and programs. It allows departments and schools to collect the needed information for revisions to courses, provide notifications across campus for affected units, and integrate into the General Announcements so that revisions don't need to be made on each and every General Announcement page. CIM is used for all Course Catalog processing.

CourseLeaf CIM can be accessed at courseleaf.rice.edu/courseadmin. A detailed step-by-step wiki to perform any action in CIM is available here.

Course Creation Process

Procedures to create new undergraduate (100-499) courses (or reactivating inactive courses) were approved by Faculty Senate in November 2015 with the goal of enhancing faculty oversight of the curriculum. The full Working Group report and recommendations are posted on the Senate webpage, and the memo from the Provost and Faculty Speaker is available.

Additional workflow approval requirements for new graduate level (500-999) courses (or reactivating inactive courses) were created by the approval of Rice Policy 108: Policy of Academic Credit Hours.

Deadlines

For new courses and for reactivation of currently inactive courses, proposal must be submitted in CourseLeaf CIM and observe the following deadlines it reaching the appropriate Dean in the CIM workflow:

  • For new courses for the Fall semester: The deadline is March 1, with an extension to August 1 for visiting faculty and postdocs and new faculty hires teaching their first Rice courses in the fall.
  • For new courses for the Spring semester: The deadline is October 1, with an extension to December 1 for visiting faculty and postdocs and new faculty hires teaching their first Rice courses in the spring.

Temporary/One-Time Only Courses

The process for creating a course that will be taught only once (e.g., by visiting faculty or postdocs) is expedited – there is no SCRC review. These courses will use designated Special Topics course numbers 238, 477, or 677 depending on the level of the course. All subject codes will use these numbers for one-time courses; each new one-time course is created as a new section of the Special Topics course. The title of the course will appear in online registration and on the student transcript. Students may take a Special Topics course with the same subject code and number more than once, since the section titles will vary and will appear on the transcript. These courses do not replace or displace existing Special Topics courses; they are specifically for courses that will be taught only once.

Please note the following about these courses:

  • Special Topic Courses (238, 477, or 677) are repeatable, and if a permanent course is created due to the popularity of the one-time Special Topics course, a student is eligible to repeat the course as the new (permanent) course. This cannot be restricted.
  • Special Topic courses may not carry Distribution Credit and cannot be cross-listed. An UG/GR equivalent may be listed once as 477/677 if requested, but it must be placed in CIM as separate courses just as a regular UG/GR equivalent course would be due to the needed workflow approvals.

Deadline for Temporary/One-Time Only Courses

The deadline for submitting forms for one-time courses to the appropriate Dean is August 1 for Fall semester courses and December 1 for Spring semester courses.

Distribution Credit (Undergraduate Courses)

When proposing a new course, faculty can indicate if the course should be considered for distribution credit on the proposal form. During the approval review process for new courses the School Course Review Committee (SCRC) will assess the request against the criteria in the General Announcements and approve or deny the request during the proposal review.

To request the addition or removal of Distribution Credit on a current course, please contact your Dean’s office. The Distribution Credit Roll Call is requested of each Dean’s office each March for the upcoming Academic Year, and Distribution Credit is applied or removed for the complete Academic Year for any current courses through that Distribution Credit Roll Call.

Process for Departmental New/Reactivated Course Approvals

The process for new departmental courses is handled automatically within CIM upon submission.

  1. Complete a new course request in CIM. Be sure to complete all fields and thoroughly answer the prompts for the evaluation of a new course. If the course is a one-time course, you must use the departmental Special Topics course number 238, 477, or 677.
  2. Submit the new course request to workflow in CIM. The workflow is as follows:
    1. Rice Online (if online instructional method is requested)
    2. Department Undergraduate Curriculum Committee Chair (or Department Graduate Curriculum Committee Chair if one is identified and course is graduate level)
    3. Department Chair
    4. School Dean
    5. School Level Review - SCRC/CUC/GC. (Please see SCRCs and the Review Process PDF.)
      • A list of course subject codes and the relevant Review Committee for each is available here.
      • For a one-time, Special Topics course numbered 238, 477, or 677 there is no SCRC/CUC/GC review, but the signature of the SCRC/CUC/GC chair is still required.
      • For Departmental Courses:
        • For a recurring course, the SCRC will review requests within 10 working days of the October 1 and March 1 deadlines; the SCRC chair will sign approved course request forms.
          • The SCRC review is limited to consideration of credit hours awarded for the course, given the contact hours, work, and assessment information provided on the course request form.
          • A pilot version of Guidelines for Assigning Credit Hours to Courses is available here, illustrating minimum standards for awarding credit hours for the course types identified by the Office of the Registrar (OTR).
          • Review of course content, subject matter, methodology is excluded; those are the responsibility of the department.
      • For Extra-Departmental Courses
        • For a recurring course, the relevant review committee will review requests within 10 working days of the October 1 and March 1 deadlines; the SCRC/CUC/GC chair will sign approved course request forms. In the review, the committee will consider suitability of the proposed course for university credit; appropriate faculty oversight of courses conducted mainly off-campus (e.g., internships and practicums); appropriate credit hours awarded for the course, given the contact hours, work and assessment information provided on the course request form. Note: A pilot version of Guidelines for Assigning Credit Hours to Courses is available here, illustrating minimum standards for awarding credit hours for the course types identified by the Office of the Registrar (OTR).
    6. Office of the Registrar (OTR)
  3. OTR will create the course and notify the relevant department of the course creation.

Sharing among SCRC/CUC/GC members of best practices in different departments is encouraged, with the goal of achieving greater consistency of standards across departments and among departmental and extra-departmental courses.

Review by CUC/GC is waived for new extra-departmental course requests with the following subject codes: AFSC, COLL, FWIS, HONS, LPAP, LPCR, MILI, DSRT.

School Course Review Committee (SCRC) Chairs

Each school has its own SCRC composed of curricular representatives chosen by each department, and the Dean of the school, ex officio. Further details are provided in the SCRCs and the Review Process PDF.

  • For departmental courses, SCRC review is limited to consideration of amount and level of credit hours awarded for the course.
  • For extra-departmental courses, SCRC review will be more extensive, except in the case of FWIS, COLL and LPAP courses, for which current review procedures will continue.
  • The course review process for Fall courses will be completed by March 15.

The SCRC chairpersons are listed below.

School SCRC Chair
Architecture Igor Marjanovic
Business Brian Rountree
Continuing Studies Robert Bruce
Engineering Gary Woods
Humanities Daniel Domingues
Music Richard Lavenda
Natural Sciences Ken Whitmire
Social Sciences Mallesh Pai

List of CIM Workflow Approvers/Notification Receivers

A list of individuals who need to approve CIM requests, as well as those who will receive notification of the approval of a proposal are listed below. If you recognize an error, please contact registrar@rice.edu.

CIM Role Definitions

The majority of roles are below. Some additional roles exist for administrative units on campus.

  • DEPT Notify: individual who has requested to be notified of all new proposals and any approvals in CIM; no review/approval
  • DEPT UG Curriculum Committee Chair: the chair of the department's undergraduate curriculum committee responsible for entering decision on proposals once reviewed by the committee; reviews/approves proposals
  • DEPT GR Curriculum Committee Chair: the chair of the department's graduate curriculum committee responsible for entering decision on proposals once reviewed by the committee; reviews/approves proposals
  • DEPT Chair: the chair of the department; reviews/approves proposals
  • SCHOOL Preapprove: step prior to the school dean, usually used as a holding and administrative review of proposals before being sent to the dean; reviews/approves proposals
  • SCHOOL Dean: dean of the school; reviews/approves proposals
  • SCHOOL SCRC: School Course Review Committee Chair responsible for entering decision on proposals once reviewed by a school's SCRC; reviews/approves proposals

Revising a Course

To revise a course that is currently active, a request to revise the course will need to be submitted through CourseLeaf CIM.

Cross-listing a Course

Two New Courses

The lead department will normally be the one in which the faculty member requesting and teaching the new course is primarily affiliated. The new course form required signatures are those appropriate to the lead department. The form must also be signed on the front page by the chair of the cross-listed department or the program director of the cross-listed program subject code. In these cases, only one New Course Request Form is required.

New Course with an Existing Course

The faculty member responsible for the currently existing course completes a course change request in CIM to request the cross-listing. Creating the new course number in another department or program requires completion of a new course request by that department or program, and submission to the appropriate Dean and review committee. This is handled automatically in CIM.

Two Existing Courses

Departments submit a request to change the course in CIM. The new course review process is not involved because these are not new courses.

Inactivating a Course

Courses that have not been offered for several semesters or will not be offered in the future should be inactivated. To inactivate a course that is currently active, a course inactivation request l need to be submitted with all the appropriate signatures to OTR.

Inactivating a course allows the course number to be reused after seven years since the last enrollment in that course number. If needed, OTR may inactivate numbers not used in the past seven years if they exist, thus freeing additional numbers for departments to use for new courses.

Reusing a Course Number

Courses must be inactive for seven years since the last enrollment to be eligible for reuse. OTR has created a dashboard for you to be able to see which courses are eligible to be reused on the Tableau Server, and the dashboard can be accessed by clicking here. You must be on the Rice network or use VPN in order to access the dashboard.

Important note about the dashboard: only courses that have been offered and have had enrollment appear. If a course has been created and never offered and/or never had enrollment, it will not appear.