How to navigate the Academic Calendar

The new academic calendars are the outcome of a multi-year software project to enhance and streamline the management of curriculum and academic calendars. The result is academic calendars that use the same platform, are automatically generated using approved curriculum, and are easier to search.

• Each academic calendar is hosted in the same Waterloo website; users have the ability to select the appropriate version: undergraduate studies or graduate studies.
• Each academic calendar presents its contents in a restructured left navigation menu.
  
• New search capabilities will search the entire academic calendar; pre-determined filters are available to narrow search results.
• The majority of the content is housed in Programs & Plans, Regulations, and Courses. Content is grouped by area of study, topic, or course subject, respectively.
  • Sample Programs & Plans search options and layout:
    
  • Sample Courses search options and layout:
    
• The Addenda section will display an automatically generated list of changes to content within the Programs & Plans, Regulations, and Courses sections of the academic calendars; in addition, the changes to content will also be visible on the page the change(s) occurred.
• Each academic calendar, to various degrees, now presents requisites (prerequisites, corequisites, antirequisites) and program/plan requirements in a series of rules, built on logic, that automatically link to other areas of the academic calendar (where applicable). Linked courses display the title and unit weight.
  • Sample course requisite coding:
    
  • Sample plan requirements listing:
    

The decision was made to universally remove the term of offering from course data (e.g., [Offered: W], [Offered: F,S]) that previously presented that type of information because it was often incorrect and misleading. Simply because the academic calendar stated a course was offered in a winter term did not mean that the faculty couldn't also offer the course in a non-winter term, not offer the course in the winter term at all, nor were they required to offer it annually.

In addition, course data in the academic calendar is updated after changes have been approved by Senate Undergraduate Council, but only on an annual basis. However, faculties require more flexibility in scheduling their courses. For upcoming terms, the Schedule of Classes and/or the Course Selection Offerings List are the most accurate sources of that information. Additionally, many faculties have chosen to track their planned offerings on their own undergraduate websites and can maintain the content as frequently as is needed.

The easiest method is to navigate to the Courses link in the left-navigation menu, and filter for the desired subject code(s). The Calendar Search cannot find "groupings" of courses.

In the drop-down menu, select the desired subject code from the list.

In addition, more than one subject code can be filtered at a time by selecting a second, third, etc., subject code from the drop-down menu. Remove filters by selecting the "X" after the filter chosen. In the example below, the list has been filtered for AMATH and PMATH courses, with the sections collapsed. To remove PMATH from the list, select the "X" after PMATH.