Curriculum & Course Approvals

Guidelines for Faculty

TST's Academic Council has developed the Governance and Procedures of Basic Degree and Graduate Curriculum and Course Approvals in order to:

  • provide for governance consistent with UTQAP and ATS accreditation requirements;
  • 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.

2026-27 Schedule for Course Approval Process - Faculty and Colleges

Once an instructor submits a course proposal, it is held by the TST registrar to be put forward at the next Academic Council meeting. There are four Academic Council meetings per year, and thus four opportunities for course approval. See the following link for the 2026-27 schedule:

2026-27 Schedule for Course Approval Process

Canonical Information includes:

  • Course Code
  • Course Title
  • Course Description
  • Credit Value
  • Contact Hours per Week
  • Pre- and/or Co-requisites
  • Delivery Mode

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 the TST Registrar.

NOTES:

  • New as of March 2026:  3000/6000 courses no longer require the submission of two separate forms.
  • 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:  A maximum of 180 characters. Due to technical reasons accents and slashes (/) cannot be used in the course title and will be removed.
  • Course Description:  A maximum of 300 words. It 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 that have been formally closed 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 - Both Basic Degree and Graduate Degree

Change to Course Canonical Information - Both Basic Degree and Graduate Degree

Course Reactivation - 1000, 2000 or 3000 Level

Course Reactivation - 5000 or 6000 Level

Please report any problems with the online forms to tst.registrar@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 and 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.