Course Proposal: Approval Workflow

- If an individual is listed as an approver for more than one subject and more than one of these subjects is cross-listed on the proposal, when they approve the proposal is approved for all subjects they are associated with.

- The approver role for subjects that are listed in the response to the question "What subjects (if any) might be interested in this course?" will be sent an email when the proposal is submitted to workflow. This is a notification only; not an approval step. However if an interested subject owner has a question or concern about the proposal they may enter a comment and it is expected that their issues will be addressed before the proposal moves on to the next approval step.

- A proposer has six (6) months to complete the proposal form and submit it to workflow. A proposal must be fully approved within one year (12 months) of being submitted to workflow. See the course proposal expiration policy.

- Proposals that are reviewed and not approved at any step may be rolled back to a previous step for revision.

For any course proposal that has been submitted to workflow by the proposer, the progress of the proposal through workflow steps can be tracked using the workflow list on the right side of the proposal. Clicking on the workflow step opens an email message populated with the email addresses of those who are in the approver role.

Types of Workflow Roles 

Those authorized by the department chair or program director may be added to an approver role using this form. 

Subject Approver = The chair of the department that owns the subject listing and anyone designated by the chair to approve proposals. If subject is on the proposal as a cross-list partner the role will be listed under the heading CrosslistedSubjs Additional information about the responsibilities of subject (department) approvers.

School/College Approver = The dean/director of the school, college, institute, or division and anyone designated by the dean or director to approve proposals. If the school/college/division is on the proposal as a cross-list partner the role will be listed under the heading CrosslistedCols. Additional information about the responsibilities of school/college/division approvers.

L&S College Approver = the dean of the College of L&S and anyone designated by the dean to approve proposals. This single role is used both for courses where the department is part of L&S and where the proposal requests LAS, Breadth or Level course attributes.

COM A Approver = If "Communications Part A" is the response selected in the General Education field, the person(s) in this role review the proposal to determine whether it meets the criteria of this attribute.

COM B Approver = If "Communications Part B" or "Section Level Communications Part B" is the response selected in the General Education field, the person(s) in this role review the proposal to determine whether it meets the criteria of this attribute.

QR-A Approver = If "Quantitative Reasoning Part A" is the response selected in the General Education field, the person(s) in this role review the proposal to determine whether it meets the criteria of this attribute.

QR-B Approver = If "Quantitative Reasoning Part B" is the response selected in the General Education field, the person(s) in this role review the proposal to determine whether it meets the criteria of this attribute.

Ethnic Studies Approver = If the question "Should this course be considered for the Ethnic Studies ... " is answered affirmatively the person(s) in this role review the proposal to determine whether it meets the criteria of this attribute.

 Cross-listed courses

The CrosslistSubjs and CrosslistCols steps are used when the course is cross-listed. They do not work the same as Subject Approver and the School/College Approver steps.

• The subjects (or school/colleges) will get the email notification telling them there is a proposal to be reviewed and approved. The email will have a link to the proposal itself and the proposal will not appear on the console page that lists all proposals for that subject listing. These proposals can only be approved through the proposal page, not the subject (or college) approver queue or the CrosslistedSubjs or Crosslisted Cols queue.
• Subjects and school/colleges listed in these roles may enter comments but may not rollback a proposal. 
• All cross-listed subjects (or school/colleges) will be listed under this step and must approve before the proposal will move to the next step in workflow. 
• The individual subject (or school/college) roles listed under the step will appear in gray text until approval has been entered and then the text will turn green. The approval path will not record which user in the role approved the proposal.
• After the last subject (or school/college) has entered approval, a system process advances the proposal to the next step. If there is no specific subject and school/college/division listed (i.e. there are no cross-list partners) then these steps (while they appear in the workflow list) are automatically skipped. 

Email Notifications 

Those listed in an approver or notify role will receive an email notification when the proposal reaches the relevant step in the approval process. This is the ONLY email that is sent until the proposal is fully approved and entered in the SIS course catalog. At that time an email notification is sent indicating the the proposal is complete and entered in SIS. This system does NOT send email notifications when a comment has been added. If a proposal needs to be edited the rollback function must be used. Rolling back a proposal includes a comment describing the needed edit and the proposal is sent back to the step indicated in the rollback action, is edited and resent (generating a new email notification requesting approval) to the next step in workflow.

Users can click the link in the email notification to access the approval console page for that role (if they are in an approver role and not a cross-list partner). Note: The approval console page loads rather slowly, please be patient!  You must select the relevant approver role from the Your Role: drop down box at the top middle right of the page.

Agricultural and Life Sciences (contact Diana Frantz Anderson)
Business (contact Joann Peck)

Education (contact Cynthia Waldeck)
Engineering (contact Sara Hagen)
Environmental Studies (contact Tara Mohan)
Human Ecology (contact Jonathan Henkel)
Law School (contact Amy Arntsen)
Letters and Science (contact Sara Stephenson)
Medicine and Public Health (contact Maddie Sychta)
Nursing (contact Katie Bleier)

Technical problems with the course proposal system can be sent to lumen@provost.wisc.edu