Course Planning

The title of a course should be roughly descriptive of the content to be taught. Please avoid too general titles or titles that may be confused with one of our basic or core lectures such as "Machine Learning". The title of a course should be final when entered into the form. Please explicitly indicate if the title of your course is not yet final. It takes some administrative effort to change the title after it has been entered in to the course catalogue or exam system.

For advanced lectures the name should be consistent between iterations. A name change should only occur if the content of the lecture has significaly changed between iterations. Name changes have formal influence on how students can re-attend previously attended and failed lectures.

You can enter anyone who is involved in the course and will regularly hold lectures, however the person listed first must be authorised to carry out examinations ("prüfungsberechtigt") at Saarland University. All the names given will be listed in the course catalogue and the first name will be listed as official examiner for the course.

Credit points (CP) are the rewards granted to students for successfully passing your course. Credit points need to roughly align with the amount of work needed to take part in your course. Per definition a CP equals to 30 hours of work. The type of teaching sessions refers to the scheduled events in your course where students are usually expected to participate, i.e. lectures and tutorials, but not optional events like office hours.

Advanced lectures can have a variable amount of credit points, but usually those lectures have 6 or 9 CP (this aligns well with the thresholds set in the various study regulations). In most cases your course will have 6 CP if you offer 1 lecture slot and a tutorial per week or 9 CP if you have 2 lecture slots and a tutorial. As you can see in the table below, only a part of this time will be occupied by the student sitting in your lecture or a tutorial. Most of the time the student will have to invest in self study, i.e. preparing and learning the lecture material, working on exercise sheets or projects, and preparing for the exam. If you want to deviate from these recommended formulas, consult with the study coordination please.

Proseminars have by definition 5 CP and regular seminars 7 CP. It is usually expected that you have one 2 hour meeting slot per week. Depending on how your seminar is implemented (research, project work, etc.) those meeting slots might be cummulated at certain times during the semester.

Yes! By the time of announcing the course to the study coordination, you should should have set up at least a simple website with basic information about the course. The course catalogue will link to this website and students should know what your lecture is about, be able to determine the minimal qualification needed to participate in your course, and where to find more information about your course later on (time schedule, material, etc.) to be able to plan their semester.

This site is usually hosted on your departments server or in one of the course managment systems (e.g. CMS or Moodle).