Each subject taught at Seneca has a subject outline. The subject outline describes the scope of the subject and establishes what a student can expect when enrolled in the subject.
Because Seneca recognizes that there may be some variation between delivery of the same subject among schools within the college, and among faculty members within the School, Seneca's Academic Policy identifies three components of a subject outline:
Common Portion: common to all offerings of the subject. This section contains information such as the name of the subject, a brief description of the subject, and the expected learning outcomes.
School Portion: containing additional information common to all offerings of the subject within a particular school. This section specifies information such as the topics to be covered, how the student will be evaluated, and the required texts and materials.
Addendum: specific to a faculty member delivering the subject, containing further details such as the faculty member's contact information and a schedule for delivery of the topics and evaluation items.
The SSOS is a web-based tool that focuses on maintaining and delivering the Common and School portions of the outline, helping to assure that:
all members of the Seneca community know where to find outlines.
changes to outlines are done with proper approval, within an acceptable time frame.
all offerings of the subject comply with academic policy.
For more information, see Benefit of SSOS
The Subject Outline System can be accessed by four different User groups: Editors, Approvers, Deans and Administrators.
An Editor has data entry privileges.
An Approver has all the privileges of an Editor along with a few additional rights (such as approving an outline modification).
A Dean has all the privileges of an Approver along with a few additional rights (such as adding an approver).
An Administrator has maximum privileges and can perform actions (such as adding a Dean) that none of the other roles can perform.
To learn more about these user roles, refer to Difference between Editors, Approvers, Deans and Administrators.
A new outline is defined as an outline for a Subject which exists in PeopleSoft but for which no subject outline has been created (and the Subject has not been taught in any of the Schools). Refer to Add New Outlines to a School to learn more.
An existing outline is defined as a subject outline which has been taught, or is currently being taught, in another School. Refer to Add an Existing Outlines to a School to learn more.
When a new outline is added to a School, the Common Portion modification process starts. When an existing subject is added to a School, the School Portion modification process starts.
To learn more about various portions (Common, School, and College Policy) of a subject outline, refer to Seneca College Outlines Overview.
Refer to the following links to learn more about modification of an outline:
If you feel that a modification you started in School or Common Portion needs to be cancelled/deleted, SSOS provides an option for doing so. Refer to the following sections to learn more about deleting a modification:
Scheduling is defined as the decision to offer a Subject Outline through a given School in a specified year-semester. Scheduling defines when a particular Subject Outline is going to be published.
For example, if you know that a Subject Outline is going to be offered only in the Fall semester then you can schedule it in such a way that the subject outline automatically gets carried over to every Fall Semester publication schedule (and gets published for every fall semester).
In another scenario, if you know that a Subject Outline is going to be offered in all three semesters (Summer, Fall and Winter) you can schedule it so that the outline automatically gets carried over to every semester publication schedule (and gets published in all semesters).
Scheduling removes the manual work required to carry forward an outline for the coming semesters. Refer to Updating Schedule Pattern for a School and Overriding School Portion Schedule Pattern for next Semester to learn more about Scheduling.
Approvers can approve a School Portion or a Common Portion Modification at any stage of the modification process. Refer to Approving School Portion modification and Approving Common Portion modification to learn more about the approval process.
The Common Portion modification which has the status of "on hold" gets archived on the common autopublish date.
When the Common Portion modification archive date arrives, SSOS searches for all existing Common Portion modifications. The only possible state could be ONHOLD_AFTERAUTOPUBLISH since other states get cleared on the common auto publish date.
SSOS creates a copy of the existing modification (originally attached with the previous semester) and attaches it to the current semester and deletes the previous modification. The information about Hold (or No Hold i.e. Edit in progress) remains intact in the outline.
On the Common autopublish date, the Common Portion gets published if the status of the outline modification is Approved.
If the status of the modification is Edit_In_Progress or OnHold then the modification status gets changed to OnHold_After_AutoPublish and the outline is not published.
The Scheduled School Portion for FCET/School will get published if the status of the outline modification is Approved. Outlines that are still under modification are discarded.
Outlines scheduled for the next semester will get carried over to the next semester. Carry over moves the outline modification, started in the last semester, to the next semester.