A New Course proposal should be submitted in order to propose the addition of a new course to the Academic Bulletin when this addition is not part of a Program Revision or New Program proposal. Since the Bulletin is a contract with our students, they should reasonably expect to be able to enroll in any course listed in the Bulletin sometime during their 8 semesters at Allegheny. If this course is not likely to be taught at least every other year, please consider offering it as a special topics course instead; instructions are available on this page.
Proposal Instructions
Please click here to open the New Course proposal template file and then click the Use Template button to create a copy of the template in your Drive. Use the instructions below to complete your copy of the proposal template and then submit it to the Curriculum Committee using this form.
Please note that Chairs will be asked to acknowledge the submission of this proposal as having been the product of a departmental discussion.
Course Information
- Course Listing: Enter the course details in Bulletin-ready language, following the guidelines below:
- Course Number: Enter a course prefix and number, e.g. ECON*100. For seven week module courses, add an “A” to the course number if the course will be taught in the first seven weeks of the semester or “B” if the course will be taught in the second seven weeks of the semester., e.g. CHEM*119*A. Please consult with the Registrar’s office about an appropriate course number. Also, if you plan to cross-list this course, please coordinate with other departments to ensure that the course number is the same for both prefixes.
- Number of Credits: The number of credits can be 1, 2, 3, or 4, or can be listed as variable (1-4).
- Course Description: See guidelines.
- Please include the language “This course will be taught as a seven-week course.” at the end of the course description, if applicable.
- Prerequisites: List the prerequisites for the course. If there are no prerequisites, write “None”. The phrase “or permission of instructor” is not necessary because instructors can always waive course prerequisites. However, if you would like instructor permission to be required for all students, please indicate this requirement in the Prerequisites.
- Distribution Requirement: If this course will count towards the Distribution Requirements, please enter no more than 2 tags (CL, HE, IP, ME, PD, QR, SB, SP) for the course. The learning outcomes for each category are listed on this page. If no tags are required, write “none”.
- Short Title: If a course title is more than 30 characters, an abbreviated title that is under 30 characters long must be provided.
- Credit Explanation: A standard course is four credits. If you are proposing that this course be less than four credits, please provide an explanation.
- Grading Option: The options are:
- Must be taken on a letter-grade basis
- Must be taken Credit/No Credit basis
- Can be taken on a letter-grade basis or a Credit/No Credit basis
- First Offering: Please enter the semester and year in which the course will first be offered.
- Frequency of Offering: Please select the option that is most likely, or provide other information, as applicable:
- Every semester
- Once a year
- Every other year.
- Staffing: Please describe who you expect to teach the course and whether you are deleting another course in order to accommodate this addition to your program.
- Courses Being Sunset: Please list all of the courses that are being sunset, i.e. permanently deleted, as part of this proposal.
- Rationale: Please explain why this course is being proposed, including how it fills a need within your program. If it is in response to program assessment, please describe how your assessment data informed this proposal.
Program Requirements and Electives
- Programs Affected: Please list all of the majors and minors that will include this new course as a requirement or an elective. The other departments affected will need to submit a program revision for each program that will include the new course.
- Bulletin Language: For any majors or minors in your department that are affected by this change, enter the current Bulletin language for that program and indicate how the new course will fit into each program by adding it in red.
You should copy and paste the language from the PDF version of the Bulletin. Alternatively, find the program language in the online version of the Bulletin, click the printer icon, and copy the current course listing from the pop-up box. Both of these methods will result in a copy that does not include the colored background.
Learning Outcomes and Mapping
- Course Learning Outcomes: Please list 3-5 course learning outcomes, keeping the following points in mind:
- Learning outcomes should describe what students should know, understand or be able to do by the end of the course and should be written broadly enough that changes in instructor, textbook, etc would not require a change to the outcomes. (Changing the outcomes for a future offering of this course would necessitate a Course Revision proposal.)
- As you write your outcomes, please think about how the wording of your outcome might affect your ability to effectively assess the outcome. For example, compound outcomes will require you to separately assess multiple components of the outcome. To avoid compound outcomes, you may need to think about which outcomes to prioritize by listing them as CLOs and which outcomes are important but don’t rise to the level of a CLO.
- CLO to PLO Mapping: Please complete the table in the following way:
- Replace PLO 1, PLO 2, etc with the exact wording of your program learning outcomes.
- Replace CLO 1, CLO 2, etc with the exact wording of your course learning outcomes.
- For each CLO, indicate any mapping to a PLO by entering I, D, R, or P in the appropriate cell in the table:
- I – Introducing
- D – Developing
- R – Refining
- P – Proficient.
- Feel free to add rows and columns, as needed.
- CLO to DR Mapping: If you have included DR tags, please complete the table in the following way:
- Replace DR 1, DR 2, etc with the DR tag and the exact wording of the corresponding DR learning outcomes, available from this page.
- Replace CLO 1, CLO2, etc with the exact wording of your course learning outcomes.
- Map the CLOs to the DR outcomes, as applicable, using an X in the appropriate cells. Each DR tag should be aligned with at least one CLO, meaning that each column should contain at least one entry.