Curriculum & Course Approvals

Guidelines for Faculty

In April 2022, TST's Academic Council approved the Governance and Procedures of Basic Degree and Graduate Curriculum and Course Approvals at TST. The development of the document included wide consultation. The governance and procedures have been developed to:

  • provide for governance consistent with UTQAP and ATS accreditation requirements (for reference, see the video of the workshop on Quality Assurance on the Faculty Assembly Quercus site;
  • promote collaborative processes of consortium-wide curriculum and course planning that involve faculty and administrators;
  • encourage syllabus production and peer review as a scholarly, creative and mutually supportive activity;
  • distinguish clearly those course elements that require governance approval ("canonical material") from those that individual faculty members have discretion to decide.

2024-25 Schedule for Course Approval Process - Faculty and Colleges

Once an instructor fills out the applicable form(s) below, it is downloaded and is sent, on a weekly basis, to the respective member college for review and confirmation of college approval. Course approvals is a standing agenda item at Academic Council. Thus, there is no longer a single date to submit new/reactivated courses. Nevertheless, deadlines do still apply. See the following link for the 2024-25 schedule:

2024-25 Schedule for Course Approval

Canonical Information includes:

  • Course Code
  • Delivery Mode
  • Course Title
  • Course Description
  • Weight
  • “Contact” Hours
  • Pre- and/or Co-requisites

A change in any of the above will require governance approval. The information in the course syllabus must match the approved Canonical Information.

Information on active courses and their approved canonical information is available through the TST SharePoint site, for access please contact Diane Henson, TST Registrar and Manager of Academic Services.

NOTES:

  • 3000/6000 courses:  Will require the submission of both the Basic Degree form AND the Graduate form.
  • Delivery Mode:  The three options are Online, In-person and Hybrid.  Details of each of these can be found in Post-Pandemic Course Delivery Goals.
  • Course Title:  Due to technical reasons accents, colons (:) and slashes (/) cannot be used in the course title and will be removed.
  • Course Description:  This should not make any reference to delivery methods or form of evaluation. If included these references will be removed before going through the governance approval process.
  • Contact Hours:  This is based on the 12-week semester, so a two-hour course over the semester would be 24 contact hours and a three-hour course would be 36 hours. This needs to be adhered to when scheduling summer intensive courses. 
  • Reactivation:  Courses to be offered in 2025-26, that were last offered in, or prior to, 2019-20, or that have been formally closed within the last five years, will require reactivation. The previous course code may not be available to use again.

IMPORTANT!

Please make sure you have all the information available prior to starting the request as the information cannot be saved and returned to later.

New Course - 1000, 2000 or 3000 Level

New Course - 5000 or 6000 Level

Course Reactivation - 1000, 2000 or 3000 Level

Course Reactivation - 5000 or 6000 Level

Change to Canonical Information for an Active 1000, 2000 or 3000 Level Course

Change to Canonical Information for an Active 5000 or 6000 Level Course 

Please report any problems with the online forms to diane.henson@utoronto.ca indicating which form and the issue.

Course instructors who teach a human research component within a course are required to submit a course template each time the course is offered (this is not a one time approval). Course templates are used when the research assignment involving human participants has strict parameters with respect to the research methodology and the participant group. When course templates are used, the course instructor must complete and submit the ethics application, including template information and consent forms, recruitment scripts and sample questions or tools. The course instructor is responsible for sharing the templates and reviewing the specific details with the students. Any approved projects that fall outside of the parameters of the template, must be submitted separately as a student-initiated project.

Completed requests should be submitted by email to the GCTS Office, gcts.office@utoronto.ca  TST’s Delegated Ethics Review Committee (DERC) provides the first review for any research ethics proposal that can be approved internally (basic degree, low risk projects) or will recommend submission to the University of Toronto’s Research Ethics Board (REB) (doctoral degree or higher risk projects). 

Faculty resources for designing courses can be found at the University of Toronto's Centre for Teaching Support & Innovation, this also includes specific information on developing learning outcomes. Examples of verbs to use in learning outcomes can be found in Blooms Taxonomy of Measurable Verbs.