Courses and course syllabi

Establishing courses

Courses that are new or have undergone changes that entail a new course code are to be established by the Faculty Board. Read more about the faculty’s procedures below.

Procedures for establishing and approving first and second-cycle course syllabi (PDF 91 kB)

Writing course syllabi

On the Staff Pages there is a handbook (in Swedish) to guide you through the process. The handbook provides good examples, tips on wording, the reasoning behind the various parts of a syllabus and the regulatory background. Via the list of contents, you can click through to the section you want to find out more about.  

Support for writing course syllabi and programme syllabi – Staff Pages (in Swedish)

Supplementary information on internship courses 

Regarding course syllabi for internship courses, special circumstances must be taken into consideration. The document produced by the Faculty of Social Sciences provides recommendations as well as examples of wording that can be used in internship course syllabi. 

Template for course syllabi for elective internship courses (PDF kB)

Supplementary information on degree projects

The faculty’s guidelines for degree projects provide instructions that you should take into account when creating course syllabi.

Guidelines for first and second-cycle degree projects (PDF 49 kB)

Contact the Course Syllabus Committee

It is strongly recommended to get assistance from the faculty-wide Course Syllabus Committee before new course syllabi are to be established or existing course syllabi are to undergo major revisions. The Course Syllabus Committee usually meets once a month and reviews the course syllabi that the departments wish to address.  

Read more about the Course Syllabus Committee 

Establishing course syllabi

The department board/equivalent makes the decision to establish a course syllabus. The decision may also be made by a management committee for a study programme, if the programme has one. 

When a course syllabus is established in Lubas, a disciplinary domain classification must be stated. Disciplinary domain classification is linked to the price of the course. Contact the Faculty’s programme coordinator if you have any questions concerning course classification.

Creating and establishing reading lists

The reading list is a separate document from the syllabus. The reading list must be approved by the Departmental Board/equivalent and made available to students at least eight weeks before the start of the course. Course literature, both compulsory and recommended, must be generally available to students, meaning that it must be available for borrowing, purchase or use in digital form. The literature list must also include other course materials that are required for the course and for which there is a cost to the student, such as software licences.

If equivalent course literature is available as an e-book, this option should be chosen.

Consider the choice of authors from a gender and diversity perspective.

The reading list must have a consistent reference system. 

• List authors by surname and first name in alphabetical order.
  Give the total number of pages and the number of pages for each type of material (compendia, collections of articles, web pages, etc.).
• State the ISBN for books.
• In cases where the student is only assessed on selected parts of a book, this should be stated in the reading list, e.g. chapters 1-12, 16-17 or by page reference, pages 1-115, 170-212.
• Also specify which research articles are included.

To support the development and definition of literature lists, a benchmark of around 2,000 pages is proposed for a 15-credit undergraduate course, and around 2,500 pages for the corresponding graduate course. Deviation from the benchmark may be justified, for example, by the nature of the course literature, such as a large proportion of scientific articles, or the presence of practical elements in the course in question

Checklist for selecting course literature from the Social Sciences Faculty Libraries (PDF 199 kb)

Establishing the range of courses

The department board/equivalent decides which courses will be offered in each semester.