All proposals for new courses should use the online CCMS (Course Catalog Maintenance System) . Please see documentation for user instructions for CCMS. The university Educational Policy Advisory Committee (EPAC) is the campus-wide committee that reviews all new courses and significant changes to existing courses.

When initiating new courses, departments must submit proposals to the Office of Academic and Student Affairs, after the necessary department and college approval processes. New course proposals are generally written by individual faculty members in conjunction with their department and, when appropriate, in collaboration with one or more other departments. If the potential for duplication or cross-listing exists, authorization will be required (within CCMS) from the appropriate department chair/school director.

At any time during the approval process, proposals may be returned to authors from any level in the process if members of reviewing committees have questions or have revision suggestions. Requests for revisions from various committees do not always require resubmission to the entire committee, but are instead approved by the chair. The suggestions or requests will be in the "comments" section in the "course" tab on the CCMS.

Although the reviewing parties at each approval level are faculty members, they may be unfamiliar with the particular content of a course. Syllabi should provide very detailed information - including specific and detailed student learning outcomes for each course.

Considerations

Before approving and promoting a syllabus in the CCMS, representatives at each level should review the following guidelines.

A new course proposal is the "master" syllabus and is different from the course outline (commonly called a course syllabus) you provide to your students at the beginning of each semester. An approved proposal is the master syllabus kept in the UNO Course Catalog Maintenance System (CCMS) for internal use and accreditation purposes.A course outline (or syllabus) contains the specific information needed for that particular semester and instructor but is also consistent with the information contained in the master syllabus. Although much of the information included in the master syllabus will also be included in the course outline, the documents meet different needs.