Annual course guide review

Departmental approval enables academic departments to review edits made to course guides by their staff, prior to submission to TQARO.

A CAPIS Manager can ‘switch on’ department approval, so that appointed staff members can double-check and approve edited course guides before they are submitted. The approval stage comes after edits have been made and the course guide has been submitted for approval by the editor.

Settings in CAPIS can be selected so that approval is required for:

• courses with minor changes; and/or
• courses with major changes; or
• all courses within a department, including those with no changes.

CAPIS Managers are default approvers, but additional approvers can be set up as required.

Instructions for staff

CAPIS managers should read managing department approval settings for the annual review (PDF) for detailed instructions about how to amend departmental approval settings, including details on how to assign the ‘approver’ role to colleagues.

CAPIS managers should read approving course guides using CAPIS (PDF) for detailed instructions about how to approve edited course guides.

Important: We would recommend that department approval settings are updated in CAPIS before instruction is given to colleagues to start reviewing and updating course information.

The annual course guide review using CAPIS takes place each year in preparation for the following academic session. Academic and/or administrative staff are responsible for reviewing specific courses or sets of courses.

• All UG, PGT and PGR course guides must be reviewed and submitted to TQARO via CAPIS via the annual review process.
• Even if no amendments are required to a course guide, the staff member responsible for it will still need to perform the annual review and submit it using CAPIS.

Instructions for staff

Academic staff, CAPIS managers and editors should click here for detailed instructions (PDF) about how to ‘perform the annual review’ for UG, PGT and PGR course guides.

Please note the following:

• If changes to teaching allocations will occur between one academic session and the next, administrative staff should ensure that the correct teacher is listed in the course guide in CAPIS before asking academic staff to edit the course information. This is so that staff have access to the guide in CAPIS.

To update staff listings for specific courses enter in to the course details via the option to ‘see the list of existing courses and proposals’ on the CAPIShomepage. Select the ‘Add co-proposer or editor’ option from the Actions  menu and amend the user list as appropriate.

• Following the introduction of the School’s devolved quality assurance framework in 2018/19, all standard modifications to existing courses will now rest with departments, either via DTC approval for major changes or with no formal approval (DTC oversight only) for most minor changes. Please see Sections 11-16 of the Quality Assurance Handbook for more information. 
  
  Modifications to the following sections of the course guide will still require a rationale to be supplied as part of the review process, for reporting purposes: course availability, teaching and summative assessment.