Course Outlines and Syllabi
Course Outlines
A one-page course outline is required by university policy for every course offered by the Faculty of Health Sciences. Instructors will receive an email reminder through TRACS to upload their course outlines. Outlines must be available to students at least two weeks prior to the start of the registration period or two months before the semester begins (March, July and November). Note that the one-page outline is different than the syllabus. See below for syllabus information.
Instructors upload their course outlines online. Please follow these instructions:
| 1. Log in to outlines.sfu.ca. 2. Select semester, course and section. Click the round icon. 3. Input data to the fields. (This can be done by free-format typing or cutting & pasting) 4. Save. 5. Scroll back up to the top of the page to confirm that the outline was saved successfully. (See green box) 6. Once the outline is finalized, click “Continue”, go to the next page, and click “Submit”. 7. The system will automatically advise the program assistant that the outline is ready to be activated. |
Before your outline is activated online, the program assistant will review to ensure that all required fields are complete.
If you have taught the course before, you may want to use the previous outline as a starting point and make any desired changes. The course content should correspond to the SFU Calendar description. If it does not conform closely, you must apply for approval before any changes can be published. Contact the appropriate program assistant, depending on whether you are teaching an undergraduate or graduate course, if you have not taught a course before and would like a copy of a previous course outline for your reference, or if you would like to apply for approval to upload content that does not closely conform to the SFU Calendar description.
Refer to this link to search for the archived course outlines: http://www.sfu.ca/outlines.html. The system has archived outlines starting from Fall 2015 onwards.
Course Syllabi and Syllabus Policies
Refer to the Policies and Procedures Related to Syllabi Review, Development and Distribution (this link requires your ID to login) for more guidance about drafting a syllabi and to locate a syllabi template.
All HSCI courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels must have a detailed syllabus that delineates course objectives and means of assessment. Attached to this policy is a template to help you design of a syllabus so that it outlines the appropriate level of detail in terms of content, objectives, and assessment tools. The recommended text in regards to grading distributions, student conduct, and other policies are also provided.
All new and substantively updated/revised courses must be reviewed as indicated below. Syllabi submitted for review do not need to be in the final draft. The GSC and UGSC are generally concerned with the review of the following: 1) the statement of learning objectives; 2) an outline of topics; and 3) a list of required readings/texts.
You will receive an email from the TRACS system to upload your syllabus, in accordance with the following schedule:
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Deadlines |
Fall Semester (September – December) |
Spring Semester (January – April) |
Summer Intersession (May – June) |
Summer Semester (May – August) |
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August 15 |
December 15 |
April 1 |
April 15 |
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First day of semester |
First day of semester |
First day of semester |
First day of semester |
For new or substantially revised courses, feedback will be provided to instructors three weeks prior to the start of the term. Notably for graduate courses, where accreditation requirements demand that courses meet certain core competency requirements, it is expected that faculty will comply with requests for revision.
The course syllabus represents a contract between the instructor and student. It is important that it clearly outlines expectations, grading and attendance policies, and appropriate student conduct guidelines to all students enrolled in the course.
A syllabus does not need to be provided in hard copy and can be distributed through Canvas or through other online formats. The scheduling of subjects may be changed after the start of a term, but once the syllabus has been circulated to students, it is strongly advised not to make further changes to: a) grading policies; b) policies regarding student conduct and academic honesty; or c) the timing of key exams.
For more resources and guidelines, refer to the links below:
The Course Outline List component allows you to display a list of course outlines from the central Course Outlines Repository. The list can be filtered by term, course level, section and more to only show specific outlines.
Note: If a course outline is not available at www.sfu.ca/outlines, it will not appear in the Course Outline List component.
When should it be used?
Use this component when you need to display multiple related course outlines on a single page. Be aware that the course outline list can get very long, depending on the filters.
Terminology:
Current - Two options, Year and Term, can be set to current, which refers to the current registration term. The current registration term will automatically rollover to the next term approximately 10 weeks prior to its start.
In-Component Editing Options
Course Outline List Tab
Title Header - Insert a title above the course outline list. (If you wish to insert a title with a different size or style of heading, use a Text component.)
Year - Filters outlines by year. If left blank, it will use the current year.
Term - Filters outlines by term. If left blank, it will use the current registration term.
Dept - Filter outlines by department. This is option is required.
Options
Click the Options toggle to reveal additional display options:
Split list - Adds a header above each course. See example 2 for a preview.
Show all sections - This option displays the outlines for all the sections, including tutorials and labs (e.g, D100, D115, D116, D118). Leaving this unchecked will display one outline for each parent section (e.g., D100, D200), regardless of how many child sections a parent may contain. This helps to reduce duplicate outlines.
CSS Class - Allows an author to provide an optional class name that will apply a style to the contents.
Filters Tab
Course Levels - Filter outlines by course level. Check each level you wish to display. If no levels are checked, the component will list all levels.
Sections - Filter outlines by sections. By default, the component will list all sections.
Columns Tab
Columns - Allows you to choose which columns to display. Please enable the “Note” column, if the “Short Note” field was filled in within the Course Outlines Application.
Examples of the Course Outline Component
Example #1
This example was set up to show outlines for all 100-level Chemistry courses scheduled for Spring 2014.
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“What happens in the Brazilian Amazon is of national and global interest,” Dino saidBrazil's Justice Minister Flávio Dino Tuesday announced that the government's Amazon Security Plan foresees 34 river and land bases and will involve the presence of different police forces, Agencia Brasil reported.
Dino said that the new security plan for the Amazon intends to create 34 new river and land bases with a constant presence of federal and state police forces. The idea is to use resources from the Amazon Fund to fund the construction of checkpoints.
“We are proposing 34 new bases, river or land, depending on the reality of each state. At each base, we will have the Federal Police, Federal Highway Police, National Force, and state police working. And, when appropriate, the Armed Forces, especially in the border area,” Dino explained in a broadcast show. The plan's guidelines were drawn up with the participation of the governments of all the Amazon states.
Last week, Dino met in Brasilia with ambassadors and other representatives from 23 European Union countries to present the program, called the Amazon Plan: Security and Sovereignty, as well as actions taken by the Federal Police in the first half of the year, especially those in cooperation with the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol).
“What happens in the Brazilian Amazon is of national and global interest,” Dino said. The expansion of the presence of security forces in the Amazon biome will also Improve public safety in the rest of the country, since the region has been used as a platform for organized crime in crimes such as international drug trafficking, illegal mining, illegal logging, predatory fishing, among others, he added.
Points of the security plan, which had already been announced by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva himself, include the expansion and modernization of the naval resources that patrol the rivers of the Amazon, the modernization of the network of captaincies, police stations, and agencies of the maritime authority, support for border platoons, increased operations in the Amazon, acquisition and modernization of aerospace systems and logistical equipment for the Armed Forces.
The plan also provides for the equipping and modernization of means and infrastructure of public security agencies operating in the Legal Amazon, the implementation of the Manaus-based International Police Cooperation Center for the protection of the Amazon, and integrated command and control centers, with an emphasis on integrated intelligence.
Meanwhile, Indigenous Peoples Minister Sônia Guajajara said Tuesday that there were still illegal miners in Yanomami Lands and blamed them for the exact death of a girl. Guajajara insisted these trespassers should be expelled by the end of the year.
According to her, more than 80% of them have been removed from Yanomami territory since the beginning of the current government (Jan. 1, 2023). But the challenge is to expel those who resist more violently, which she hopes will be done by the end of this year.
“We managed to remove 82% of the miners. There is a much more violent and dangerous situation because there are those people who resist leaving the territory, hide, and are causing conflicts. This final phase is much more difficult,” she said.
“According to information from the leaders themselves, it is people linked to drug trafficking and organized crime who want to stay there. And, really, they are there provoking conflicts between indigenous people and indigenous people, to pretend that they are internal problems, but, in fact, it is still a consequence of mining,” she added.
The body of the seven-year-old child was found by Roraima firefighters last Friday, after three days of searching in the Parima River region. The body was handed over to the family to perform the indigenous rituals. On July 3, five indigenous people were injured and the child was murdered, after conflicts with firearms inside the Yanomami land.
(Source: Agencia Brasil)
Are you surprised? You shouldn’t be surprised. If it feels like every streaming service has been getting a price hike lately, you can trust those feelings. Price increases have impacted a ton of services lately. From music to video streaming, it feels like no one has been spared a price increase over the last year. You’d have to be subscribed to some incredibly niche streaming service to avoid a price hike.
It appears that Amazon has looked around and noticed that, while all of us complain every time it has happened with our other services, we’ve largely stuck around anyway. So, the company has decided to institute a price hike of its own. As reported by Variety, Amazon Music Unlimited is about to get more expensive for Amazon Prime members.
According to the report, the price of the Amazon Music Unlimited individual plan will increase from $8.99 per month to $9.99 per month (according to an update on Amazon’s website). Non-Prime members will still pay more at $10.99 per month (the company increased the price of that plan back in February). Amazon is also increasing the price of the Amazon Music Unlimited family plan from $15.99 per month to $16.99 per month.
- The Amazon Music Unlimited Individual Plan for Prime members is changing from $8.99 to $9.99 per month, $89 to $99 per year.
- The Amazon Music Unlimited Family Plan is changing from $15.99 to $16.99 per month, $159 to $169 per year.
For those who thought they might be able to avoid the price increase by paying annually, you are unfortunately out of luck as well. The company is increasing the price of the annual plan for individuals from $89 per year to $99 per year. For families, the annual family plan is increasing from $159 per year to $169 per year.
So, when is this price increase going into effect? According to Amazon, for existing customers, the price increase will go into effect for all plans “on or after September 19, 2023, on the date of their next monthly renewal.” For new customers who sign up for Amazon Music Unlimited on or after August 15, 2023, they will start paying the increased prices immediately, so if you sign up today, you’re already paying the higher price.
From August 15, 2023, new customers will see the updated price when signing up to Amazon Music Unlimited. For existing customers, the updated price will go into effect on or after September 19, 2023, on the date of their next monthly renewal.
It’s not surprising to see Amazon make this move. Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music have all instituted price increases in their own music streaming services over the last year. Price increases have also occurred across most of the major video streaming services as well.
We’ll likely see this trend continue, so get ready to pay cable-level prices for streaming. For some people, that is already the reality.
From Boosting Amazon Bedrock to Free Courses: AI at AWS Summit
Fellow cloud giants Microsoft and Google might be hogging the enterprise AI spotlight these days, but Amazon Web Services (AWS) touted a torrent of its own advances at the company's exact AWS Summit event.
It took less than two minutes for AWS exec Swami Sivasubramanian to confirm generative AI was a focus point of AWS Summit New York City 2023 during a keynote presentation last Thursday.
"Generative AI has captured our imaginations for its ability to create images and videos, write stories and even generate code," said the VP of Databases, Analytics and ML at AWS. "I believe it will transform every application, industry and business."
Sivasubramanian isn't alone in that thinking, as Microsoft and Google are the vanguard of generative AI advancements unleashed by OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot late last year, which spawned a steady series of stunning advancements ever since. Microsoft got early access to Gen AI tech from OpenAI thanks to a massive investment, which prompted Google -- fearing for its internet search supremacy -- to quickly declare a "code red" to catch up with several speeded-up announcements and experiments of its own.
AWS might have seemed to be a step behind its cloud rivals but has been making moves to catch up, such as last month announcing a $100 million investment into a new program, as detailed in the AWS Insider article, "AWS Invests $100 Million in New Generative AI Innovation Center."
AWS highlighted seven AI-related announcements from the summit, two concerning Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that makes foundation models (FMs) from leading AI startups and Amazon available via an API. Foundation models are large machine learning models trained on a vast quantity of data at scale, making them suitable for a wide range of downstream tasks, according to Wikipedia.
AWS announced a Bedrock expansion that involves additional FMs, a new model provider, and advanced capability to help customers build Gen AI applications. Cohere is the new FM provider, and the latest FMs come from Anthropic and Stability AI. AWS also showcased a new capability for creating fully managed agents in just a few clicks, which it described as "a game-changing feature" that can help builders regardless of their ML expertise.
"Agents for Amazon Bedrock is a new, fully managed capability that makes it easier for developers to create generative-AI based applications that can complete complex tasks for a wide range of use cases and deliver up-to-date answers based on proprietary knowledge sources," AWS said in a July 26 news release. "With just a few clicks, agents for Amazon Bedrock automatically break down tasks and create an orchestration plan -- without any manual coding. The agent securely connects to company data through a simple API, automatically converting data into a machine-readable format, and augmenting the request with relevant information to generate the most accurate response."
As far as the new FMs, they include Claude 2 from Anthropic -- a large language model (LLM) that can generate text for several purposes, including writing code -- and Stable Diffusion XL 1.0, which focuses on images/video and is capable of generating realistic creations for films, television, music and instructional videos.
"These FMs join AWS's existing offerings on Amazon Bedrock, including models from AI21 Labs and Amazon, to help meet customers where they are on their machine learning journey, with a broad and deep set of AI and ML resources for builders of all levels of expertise," AWS said in a post reviewing Gen AI innovations discussed at last week's event.
In addition to the Bedrock announcements, AWS highlighted:
- Amazon OpenSearch Serverless now supports vector engine, which makes it easier for customers to use vectors for search and generative AI applications without managing a vector database infrastructure. Vector embeddings enable machines to understand relationships across text, images, audio and video content in an ML-digestible format.
- Amazon QuickSight introduced generative BI, which allows customers to generate business intelligence using natural language questions and share insights with visualizations in seconds.
- AWS HealthScribe is a new service that uses generative AI to create transcripts and clinical notes from speech recognition, helping health care professionals save time and focus on patients.
- Amazon EC2 P5 instances are now available, powered by NVIDIA H100 GPUs, which are optimized for training and running large language models and generative AI applications faster than ever.
- AWS offers on-demand skills training for different audiences who want to learn about, implement and use generative AI, including developers, engineers, data scientists, executives and AWS Partners.
"Generative AI will help Improve experiences for customers as they interact with virtual assistants, intelligent customer contact centers, and personalized shopping services," AWS said. "An employee might see their productivity boosted by generative AI-powered conversational search, text summarization, or code generation tools. Business operations will Improve with intelligent document processing or quality controls built with generative AI. And customers will be able to use generative AI to turbocharge the production of all types of creative content."
Background
Industry experts have found that an aging population, emerging treatment methods and technology advances mean strong career prospects for well-qualified sales reps.
Potential Earnings
PayScale.com sets the average compensation package for entry-level representatives at $51,297 but also notes a significant upside for bonus compensation and long term growth.According to MedReps, total compensation for an experienced pharmaceutical sales reps can be up to $149,544 per year, with an average base of $92,698 and bonus.
The Biden administration on Monday issued informal guidance on the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision striking down affirmative action in admissions, stressing that there are still legal ways for colleges and universities to pursue racial and ethnic diversity in their student enrollments.
“For institutions of higher education, this may mean redoubling efforts to recruit and retain talented students from underserved communities, including those with large numbers of students of color,” says a “Dear Colleague” letter from Catherine E. Lhamon, the assistant secretary for civil rights in the U.S. Department of Education, and Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the U.S. Department of Justice.
“Students from disadvantaged backgrounds, who are disproportionately students of color, are more likely to attend PreK-12 schools that lack the particular courses, types of instruction, and enrichment opportunities that prepare students for college, and that colleges and universities seek in their admissions process,” the letter says.
No need to ignore race altogether, guidance document says
Lhamon and Clarke, along with Secretary of Education Miguel A. Cardona, had struck similar themes at a Washington event for higher education leaders in late July in response to the Supreme Court’s June 29 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, which struck down race-conscious admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. They promised the guidance document would be released this month.
The six-page question-and-answer document emphasizes that colleges may still seek a diverse student-applicant pool by using “targeted outreach, recruitment, and pipeline or pathway programs.”
“The court’s decision in SFFA does not require institutions to ignore race when identifying prospective students for outreach and recruitment, provided that their outreach and recruitment programs do not provide targeted groups of prospective students preference in the admissions process,” the document states.
Higher education institutions may direct outreach and recruitment efforts toward schools and districts that serve predominantly students of color and those of limited financial means, the document says. They may also target school districts or high schools that are underrepresented in the institution’s applicant pool by focusing on such factors as geographic location, low-performing schools or schools with high dropout rates, large percentages of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch, or historically low numbers of graduates being admitted to the institution, it says.
Pathway programs, such as mentoring and summer enrichment, may also be used as tools to Improve diversity among admissions applicants, the document notes.
The guidance also embraces Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s language in his majority opinion that “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”
This means, the new document says, that “a university could consider an applicant’s explanation about what it means to him to be the first Black violinist in his city’s youth orchestra or an applicant’s account of overcoming prejudice when she transferred to a rural high school where she was the only student of South Asian descent.”
The institution could also consider a high school guidance counselor or other recommenders who described how a student, for example, “conquered her feelings of isolation as a Latina student at an overwhelmingly white high school to join the debate team,” the document says.
“In short, institutions of higher education remain free to consider any quality or characteristic of a student that bears on the institution’s admission decision, such as courage, motivation, or determination, even if the student’s application ties that characteristic to their lived experience with race,” the document states. But it does note the chief justice’s caveat that any such admissions benefit be tied to the individual applicant’s characteristics and that the student be “treated based on his or her experiences as an individual” and “not on the basis of race.”
Additionally, the document says colleges may still collect demographic data about students (including about race and ethnicity), which are used for a variety of purposes. But it notes that the Supreme Court “criticized the practice of institutions adjusting their admissions priorities dynamically in response to demographic data on the race of students in the admitted class.” Thus, the document says, “institutions should ensure that the racial demographics of the applicant pool do not influence admissions decisions.”
A former Education Department official calls the interpretation “an end run” around the ruling
A footnote in the Q&A document says its contents “do not have the force and effect of law and do not bind the public or impose new legal requirements, nor do they bind the Departments of Education and Justice in the exercise of their discretionary enforcement authorities.”
William E. Trachman, a former Education Department official who served under President Donald Trump, said he was encouraged that OCR and the Justice Department’s civil rights division say in the document that they will fully enforce the Supreme Court decision in the context of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits race discrimination in federally funded programs.
“But the rest of the document looks to me to be close to an end run” around the decision, said Trachman, who is now the general counsel of the Mountain States Legal Foundation in Lakewood, Colo., and who wrote a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of several other former Trump administration Education Department officials supporting the challenge to affirmative action.
Targeting and recruiting underrepresented groups is “generally OK,” he said, though it would be problematic if colleges only aimed such programs at racial minorities. Pathway programs that promise admission to participants from underrepresented minority groups, however, would seem to be a form of end run around the Supreme Court decision, he said.
Trachman said he found it noteworthy that the document does not offer any legal citations to back up some of its assertions about what is permissible in such areas as targeting, recruiting, and pathways.
“I do think this [interpretation] is aggressive,” he said. “It makes the least robust inferences possible about [the Supreme Court decision].”
