Are courses allowed to evolve in your department?
Teaching Professor at an R1 in a field that is constantly changing - new technologies, new methods, new applications. Obviously, the core concepts that we teach at the 100-300 undergrad level stay the same, but several of our 400-level classes are updated regularly by whomever is teaching them to reflect the more recent innovations - as they should be if we want to honestly say that we are preparing our students for their careers. Recently, however, there’s been an administrative push to ensure that all courses are being taught in compliance with their filed course proposals (many of which were last updated literal decades ago). At our school, these proposals are quite detailed, requiring the dept to include not just a course description, but the number of hours (ie class periods) allotted to every topic in the syllabus, and they often won’t be approved if the topic list is too generic. How do other depts and schools handle this issue? We want our courses to reflect the filed descriptions, syllabi, learning objectives, etc, but we also don’t want to be slaves to the process at the expense of our courses’ value to the students. They SHOULD be learning the most recent methods, technologies, and applications!