Required Details

Standard meeting patterns are critical for three reasons:

• To offer efficient, effective class scheduling for students
• To ensure optimal use of classroom resources
• To meet minimum standards for an academic credit hour

Occasionally, academic units choose to offer a course that:

• Addresses a special topic
• Relates to a current event
• Allows the unit to evaluate demand for a new area of study

Note that designating a course as a special topic/variable title course is not intended to allow units to avoid the course remonstrance process.

If a course has been approved for a variable title, you can request new variable titles by emailing indysch@iu.edu.

Official practice for offering the same topic multiple times

Special topics courses with the same variable title should not be offered more than four times. Once the course has been offered four times, one of the following permanent actions is required:

• The course content AND title should be discontinued.
• The course should be submitted through the formal course approval process to be offered with a permanent course number.

Academic units will monitor compliance with this practice.

If a unit has a concern about variable topics classes offered in another unit, the issue should be resolved between the two units. Issues that cannot be resolved will be forwarded to the chief academic officer.

There are many reasons courses may be restricted to certain student populations. A course could be limited to majors or to students who’ve taken earlier courses in a sequence. Regardless of the reason, the Office of the Registrar requires departments to accurately reflect restrictions to enrollment in these ways:

• Enrollment requirements groups (ERGs). Enrollment requirement groups are prerequisite information built into the SIS that allows the system to perform a check at the point of enrollment. An ERG may restrict enrollment to a specific major, class standing, grade in a prior course, test score, or any combination of the above.
• Class permissions. At times, an ERG isn’t the best option for restricting enrollment. For example, enrolling for a study abroad course may require a student to be accepted into a study abroad program. With no way to verify this in the SIS, using a class permission or department consent is permitted.
• Class notes. All ERGs and class permissions should have a matching class note making these restrictions clear to students. All class permission notes should provide information about whom a student should contact to seek permission to enroll.

Note that consistent prerequisite information should also be included in the academic bulletin and on any degree map that includes a course with prerequisites.

At times, units may need to group courses together for curricular or enrollment purposes. The Office of the Registrar coordinates this by building combined courses or block enrollment courses.

Meeting registrar deadlines for submitting these requests is critical.

Combined enrollment

Combining classes allows two different classes to meet together. This often is necessary when classes are crosslisted between two different departments or careers.

Submitting a combined course request is important, because if the classes aren’t grouped together in the system the registrar won’t be able to assign an appropriate classroom. You run the risk of being assigned a classroom that’s not large enough to hold both classes together.

Classes can be combined in two ways: by controlling enrollment separately or by using shared enrollment.

Control enrollment separately

Class A and class B can be combined so each has 15 dedicated seats, for an overall enrollment capacity of 30. With this option, class A could be closed with a waitlist while class B still has available seats.

This is often used when two departments each want to maintain seats for their subject area, or when maintaining dedicated seats for undergraduates and graduate students is necessary.

Use shared enrollment

Classes A and B can be combined with an overall enrollment capacity of 30, regardless of which class gets the enrollment. Class A may have 23 students, while class B has 7. Until the overall enrollment cap of 30 is reached, both classes remain open.

This is most often used for classes within a department or academic unit when separate enrollments are less critical than filling the offering.

Block enrollment

Block enrollment is used when students must take several classes together. The block is set up so students cannot add or drop one class without adding or dropping the other(s). Be sure to notify the registrar early to allow time to create these corequisite courses in the SIS.

Schedulers must work with the registrar to build a block enrollment class to carry the credit hours from the group of classes and to have a meeting pattern (time, day, location, topic, and instructor) for each class. Close to the start of the semester, the registrar breaks the block into individual classes on the student’s behalf. At that point, further enrollments are managed administratively.