Section 5.6 Gaining university approval and negotiating with the registrar.
¶Considerable time and effort was devoted to gaining university approval for the new courses. The process included preparing and submitting a proposal for each new course, review by various stakeholders, and final approval by a university committee.
The department chair reflected on what happened when they finally were ready to start teaching the new courses. The students were unable to register:
The next step was to look at how this would work within the university...and that turned out to be, to propose some really more difficult hurtles than simply realigning the courses...We had three paradigms each term...Different course numbers, met at the same time in the same room...The computer didn't know that they didn't overlap in the calendar because that wasn't part of the registration computer, every other course was ten weeks, and the computer didn't know that there was such a thing as three week courses, so it would not allow our students to register. We had to register them by hand. They had to come to the office. We had to have somebody register them by hand, every one. It was very difficult...
Eventually the students were able to register in the normal way but it took several years to work this out.