CASE Proposals

Proposing a course to count in the CASE curriculum

All students earning a baccalaureate degree from the College must complete College of Arts and Sciences Education (CASE) requirements. The specific requirements vary by degree type (B.A., B.A.J., B.F.A., B.L.S., or B.S.), but all students will be required to complete some variation of:

  • Critical Approaches to the Arts and Sciences (CASE CAPP)
  • Public Oral Communication (CASE POC)
  • Breadth of Inquiry (CASE A&H, CASE S&H, and CASE N&M)
  • Culture Studies
    • Diversity in the United States (CASE DUS)
    • Global Civilizations and Cultures (CASE GCC)
  • Intensive Writing (CASE IW)
  • Sustainability Literacy (CASE SL; effective Summer 2024)

Upcoming CASE deadlines

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CASE list

A semester-by-semester CASE list is published in the College Bulletin.

View the list

Requirements for CASE courses and submitting proposals

In order to be considered for inclusion in the CASE curriculum, the course must meet the General Requirements for CASE courses. If a unit determines that a course meets the minimum requirements and appropriate learning outcomes (see next section), a unit administrator (Chair, Director, or Director of Undergraduate Studies) or an approved curricular assistant may initiate a CASE proposal.

Proposal form

Unit administrators and approved staff can submit CASE proposals.

Initiate a proposal

To be eligible for a CASE designation, courses must:

  1. Be fully approved and active in the University Course Catalog; Topic IDs for Variable Title courses should be reserved. This means that courses must have been proposed, survived remonstrance, and added to the University Course Catalog.
  2. Unless otherwise noted, be offered for at least 3 credit hours.
  3. Be a College of Arts and Sciences course (a course managed by a College department of program or the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, the Media School, or School of Art, Architecture, and Design).
  4. Be an undergraduate course (any level from 100 to 499).
  5. Be offered at least once every four years and have been taught within the last three years.
  6. In circumstances where course-level approval is being sought for a Variable Title course, clearly demonstrate that all topics meet the learning outcomes for the designation being sought; otherwise, topic-level approval must be sought.
  7. Be conducted as a formal class (cannot be an independent study or other non-standard format).
  8. Fully incorporate the CASE learning outcomes for the CASE designation being sought (see the "CASE descriptions and learning outcomes" section below). This means the CASE learning outcomes are:
    1. Built into (though NOT verbatim) the course's learning outcomes in a clearly-denoted "Learning Outcomes" section. Bulleted learning outcomes are preferred.
    2. Evident throughout the syllabus. Is it clear that specific assignments are aligned with them? Are there clear references to relevant considerations in the course schedule/readings and the like? In short, departments/programs must ensure that each syllabus actually evidences the particulars in some clear measure.
  9. Have obtained final approval to carry CASE designation may be advertised as having such designation on course descriptions, websites, blogs, or flyers.
  10. Comply with College combined section (joint-listing) and cross-listing policies.

CASE proposals are generally due about one month prior to beginning of the enrollment period for the term the approval is to take effect. The specific deadlines are published on this website.

Once a CASE proposal is submitted, it will be reviewed by the College and the decision will be communicated to the unit's administration. These reviews are typically completed once per cycle, just after the semester's deadline.

Unit administrators and approved staff may track the status of a proposal through the CASE Proposal App or see a detailed list of the unit's courses and any CASE credit they carry through the Unit Courses App.

Initiate a CASE proposal

CASE descriptions and learning outcomes

Each CASE requirement has a unique function in the CASE curriculum. The general characteristics and learning outcomes for each are provided below.

The CASE Foundations requirement, which consists of English Composition (CASE EC) and Mathematical Modeling (MM), is uniquely tied to the campus's General Education Foundations requirement. Therefore, if you wish to have a course carry CASE EC or CASE MM, you will need to propose the course through the General Education course proposal process.

Arts and Humanities (CASE A&H) courses:

  1. Examine the complexity of human experience, interrogate the range of human thought and emotion, interpret varieties of aesthetic expression, and grapple with moral issues.
  2. Analyze written texts and works in literature, the visual arts, music, and the other performing arts, as well as philosophical and religious thought, and intellectual and cultural traditions from both contemporary and historical perspectives.
  3. Develop the abilities to think rationally and to construct and assess opinions, ideas, and arguments. The approach may be comparative, historical, or analytical, but the emphasis is on developing students' interpretive and critical skills.
  4. Explore and analyze the artifacts of human expression and/or put their knowledge into practice through producing work in any of the following:
    • Literary form;
    • Visual arts (painting, sculpture, textiles, etc.);
    • Musical composition and performance;
    • Dramatic performance (live theater, video and film, dance, etc.).
  5. Include some written component-whether an analytical paper, a research paper, or a response to an aesthetic experience.

Social and Historical Studies (CASE S&H) courses:

  1. Analyze social institutions, the behavior of individuals in social contexts and historical settings, and changes in social conditions over time.
  2. Study the political, economic, and cultural institutions of society, from individuals in social interactions to the international system of nation-states and transnational organizations and actors as well as changes in the human condition over time, including the inception, development, and transformation of institutions and civilizations, ideas, genres, or forms of representation.
  3. Help students gain knowledge of human cultures and the impact of historical events by:
    • Understanding and using appropriate theoretical underpinnings and methodologies;
    • Developing their critical analytical skills;
    • Increasing social awareness and the ability to reason ethically;
    • Developing an appreciation for diversity and inclusiveness.
  4. Include some written component, whether an essay, an analytical paper or a research paper that addresses social, historical and/or cultural aspects of human cultures and events.

Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CASE N&M) courses:

  1. Provide an understanding of physical and biological phenomena.
  2. Introduce students to systematic investigation of those phenomena.
  3. Show the value of scientific inquiry and hypothesis testing.
  4. Review the state of the science related to scientific theories and natural laws and the evidence for them.
  5. Establish the role and approaches of mathematics.
  6. Cover the natural sciences, introducing and emphasizing basic principles of the chemical, physical, and life sciences, and expand students' understanding of the physical world and scientific inquiry about it, as well as analytical reasoning and mathematics.
  7. May focus on forms of reasoning or the nature and processes of cognition and computation.

Diversity in the United States Revised (CASE DUS) courses consider the challenges and opportunities that diversity presents in pluralistic, liberal-democratic societies such as the United States.

Learning outcomes

Students who complete the CASE DUS requirement will be able to demonstrate:

  1. An ability to identify and evaluate the ways in which diversity—whether racial, ethnic, gendered, religious, cultural, economic, or other dimensions of difference—complicates and enriches life in a liberal-democratic society.
  2. The capacity to describe, distinguish, and analyze a range of values, attitudes and methods of organizing cultural and social experiences so as to understand the possibilities and limitations of their own worldview.
  3. An understanding of how cultural practices and artifacts represent the communities that produced them and how they serve to create, refine, and blend cultures.
  4. Facility in using a vocabulary of topics, tropes, narratives and other discursive strategies to identify and productively engage the problems and possibilities that diversity poses for the United States in the contemporary world.

CASE Global Civilizations and Cultures (CASE GCC) courses examine the distinctive worldview, institutions, and patterns of organization of a non-U.S. civilization or culture. Courses either:

  1. Focus on the art, religion, literature, political and philosophical traditions, social behavior and institutions, etc. of a particular culture or civilization (but only if it devoted a substantial amount of time to the relationship(s) between that specific aspect and the culture more generally); or
  2. Have a broad conceptual focus within a narrow geographical and temporal setting(e.g., religious practices in a particular country or across a specific time frame); or
  3. Have a narrow conceptual focus across a broad geographical or temporal setting (e.g., "global cities" on different continents or as manifest across broad expanses of time).
Learning outcomes

Students who complete the CASE GCC requirement will be able to demonstrate:

  1. Knowledge of non-U.S. cultures and civilizations (including beliefs, values, perspectives, practices, and products).
  2. An ability to explain the relational complexities of cultural forms and ideologies, institutional arrangements, social and political institutions, etc., whether studying a single culture and/or civilization or taking a comparative approach that examines cultures and civilizations across time and space.
  3. Facility in using a vocabulary of topics, tropes, narratives and other discursive strategies to analyze, interpret, and productively engage different cultures and civilizations on a global scale.

Critical Approaches to the Arts and Sciences (CASE CAPP) courses help first- and second-year students develop an understanding of the fundamental questions and methods in the various disciplines, departments and programs represented in the College and in the liberal arts. Rather than focusing on depth of coverage, CASE Critical Approaches courses should introduce students to the different kinds of scholarship that take place in a university and to the ways that universities organize knowledge. In addition, the CASE Critical Approaches courses serve as a gateway to the College experience and encourage students to engage intellectually and creatively with a wide variety of current and provocative issues. We also anticipate that courses related to current or upcoming Themester themes will be part of the CASE Critical Approaches inventory.

Learning outcomes

Students who complete CASE CAPP will demonstrate:

  • An understanding of the ways particular disciplines within in the liberal arts seek answers, solve problems, and organize ideas or the merits of viewing a problem from an interdisciplinary or a multidisciplinary perspective; and
  • An ability to seek information from various sources, evaluate the validity of that information, and construct arguments.

CAPP courses must also satisfy CASE and IUB General Education Breadth of Inquiry learning outcomes.

Teaching CAPP courses

Any full-time member (including a full-time lecturer) of the College faculty is eligible to teach CASE Critical Approaches. In the best case, faculty involved in this initiative will span the disciplines, come from departments large and small, and include both junior and senior scholars. These faculty members will have several opportunities to interact with other faculty members teaching CASE Critical Approaches courses and to learn from this community of committed teachers.

Faculty members may use CASE Critical Approaches courses to explore subjects that fall outside the curricular offerings of a particular department, enabling them to introduce students to new or related topics. They may also take a question pursued in their disciplines and introduce students to the approaches used by scholars in that field to investigate and understand the problem.

CASE Critical Approaches, depending on their size and capacity, may carry additional AI appointments. CASE Critical Approaches offers departments the opportunity to attract students at the beginning of their studies in the College and offers students CASE Breadth of Inquiry credit as well as a means of satisfying a campus-wide General Education Breadth of Inquiry requirement.

Proposing a CASE CAPP course

Proposals for CAPP courses are solicited once a year, early in the Fall semester. Notifications of decisions are usually sent in November for the following academic year.

Candidates for all bachelor's degrees in the College of Arts and Sciences must complete the Public Oral Communication (CASE POC) requirement. A course in Public Oral Communication prepares students in the liberal arts to communicate effectively with public audiences.

The course emphasizes oral communication as practiced in public contexts: how to advance reasoned claims in public; how to adapt public oral presentations to particular audiences; how to listen to, interpret, and evaluate public discourse; and how to formulate a clear response.

The ability to communicate effectively in a public setting is an essential component of a liberal arts education and an important skill needed in every discipline. Employers continually emphasize the need for students to have well-developed oral communication skills.

To facilitate broad participation and to better identify the course with the College-wide requirement, the College created COLL-P 155 Public Oral Communication. The design of COLL-P 155 follows a hybrid model—a one-hour weekly lecture is paired with two lab sections supervised by Associate Instructors.

A call for Associate Instructor nominations is sent to units in December each year. The Department of English conducts a one-week training session for graduate students from departments across the College who will serve as AIs in the coming academic year. For students appointed late to teach P155 in the spring semester, a second training session will be held in October.

Please see the CASE Intensive Writing section below.

CASE Sustainability Literacy examines the interactions between people and the environment to improve well-being, ensure equity for present and future generations, and safeguard the planet's life-supporting ecosystems.

Learning outcomes

Students who complete the CASE Sustainability Literacy requirement will be able to:

  • Define sustainability and identify major sustainability challenges;
  • Apply sustainability concepts to address challenges in a global context; and
  • Evaluate actions in ways that acknowledge interconnections between the environment and other aspects of the liberal arts.

CASE Intensive Writing

The purpose of the CASE Intensive Writing (IW) requirement is to provide students with practice in writing, preferably in their major field, under the direction of an instructor well acquainted with the standards of good writing in that discipline.

Structural requirements

To be considered for CASE IW, courses must be taught:

  1. For at least 3 credit hours unless a lower number of hours is approved in writing by the Office of Undergraduate Curriculum, Policy, and Records
  2. At the 200–499 level.
  3. By a qualified instructor, which means in most cases a full-time member of the faculty (tenure-track or lecturer). Under unusual circumstances, the instructor may be a visitor or an advanced graduate student working under the close supervision of a full-time faculty member; in these cases, written permission must be obtained from the Office of Undergraduate Curriculum, Policy, and Records.
  4. In sections that do not exceed a total of 25 students. CASE IW courses may be taught as a combined section (joint-list) with a course at the 500–699 level so long as no more than 5 seats are offered through the graduate section and the combined number of seats for all sections does not exceed 25.
  5. In sessions at least 8 weeks in length during the Fall and Spring academic terms and at least 6 weeks in length during the summer term; full-semester courses are preferred.
Course content requirements

CASE Intensive Writing courses must:

  1. Assign a sequence of papers written in English (a minimum of 5,000 words per semester) or a longer paper broken up into steps, so planned as to introduce a series of problems in writing fundamental to the discipline in which the course is taught.
    • Essay exams, journal entries, and other types of informal writing are not counted as part of the 5,000-word requirement.
    • "A series of problems" may be interpreted to mean a number of different analytical methods or a variety of topics, but in all cases there should be a pattern in assignments that will encourage the student's continuous development as a writer.
  2. Include instruction in the techniques, strategies, and organization of good writing. Mechanical skills (grammar, punctuation, spelling, and the like) need not be formally taught, but the instructor should insist on correctness; he or she might, for example, explicitly lower a grade on this basis, or decline to grade a paper until such errors have been corrected.
  3. Provide students with periodic evaluations of their writing.
  4. Require students to redraft one or more significant papers in light of the instructor's commentary. Revisions do NOT count toward the 5,000-word minimum.

CASE Intensive Writing syllabi must include:

  • An explanation of how the course will meet the minimum writing requirements for Intensive Writing (i.e., the 5,000 words of original work, with required revisions).
  • Clear learning outcomes, including learning objectives related to CASE Intensive Writing.
  • A link to the definition of plagiarism as included in the Code of Student Rights, Responsibilities, and Conduct.
Learning outcomes

The College also expects that students will develop formal writing skills as is appropriate to a particular field or discipline of discovery and/or interpretation. As such, specific learning outcomes need to be adapted to different fields and disciplines. Students in humanistic fields often write with the "thesis" as their point of focus, while scientists typically organize their work around hypotheses. Evidence might be evaluated differently in different fields and the choice of an appropriate style sheet will vary as well. The general learning outcomes that we expect to find in IW courses are listed below. Not all of these learning outcomes will apply in every course.

  • Accurately employ field-specific vocabulary and concepts
  • Distinguish between primary and secondary sources
  • Develop arguments (claims to fact, value, or policy supported by evidence and reasoning)
  • Distinguish between and employ different forms of evidence
  • Distinguish between formal and informal modes of reasoning (e.g., deduction vs. induction)
  • Recognize and employ appropriate genres of discourse
  • Frame and develop a research question, hypothesis, or thesis as is appropriate to different genres of writing
  • Perform literature reviews as is relevant to a particular field or discipline
  • Employ appropriate style sheets and reference systems (students should be required to demonstrate minimal mastery with at least one style sheet such as APA, Chicago, MLA, etc. as is appropriate)
  • Adapt ideas to different audiences, e.g., the difference between addressing experts versus lay audiences

Every Intensive Writing syllabus must include a link to Indiana University's definition of plagiarism in the Code of Student Rights, Responsibilities, and Conduct. A clear warning that outlines your own course policies and potential grade penalties, as well as carefully designed assignments, can substantially reduce plagiarism in your course; however, in this era of instantaneous access to data and text, it is more important than ever to properly teach students the purposes and correct forms of source citation.

As writing instructors, we need to provide students with a better understanding of how citation contributes to the research process and shapes the conversation. One strategy is to introduce the topic of citation in the context of your own research and writing projects, explaining to students that proper citation contributes to the creation of knowledge.

To this end, citations should not be presented to students simply as a predetermined number of notes required for a research paper. Treating citations as a series of hoops to jump through for a research assignment or as an arbitrary set of formatting protocols obscures the underlying utility of notes and confuses the fundamental issue of academic integrity.

Instead, students in Intensive Writing classes need to understand that appropriate, informative, and thorough citations are a means of extending the reach and impact of their writing. Such notes:

  • position the students' ideas in a wider discussion on a topic of interest and importance
  • document the process and the time that students have invested as researchers investigating what other writers have had to say on a particular issue or set of questions
  • direct readers to important sources and statements in the discussion, thereby allowing them to form their own opinion not only of the essay at hand but also of the primary sources from which the material is drawn
  • give credit where credit is due, thereby recognizing the communal dimension of knowledge while simultaneously highlighting a student's own contributions as well as those of others

Campus resources on this topic include: