NOVA Online has a dedicated team working throughout the year on semester course preparations. The team prepares courses for start dates in the current semester as well as for the upcoming semester. If you are working on a course design and development project, your instructional designer will communicate deadlines with you and continuously communicate with all parties involved as deadlines approach.
Timeline Overview
NOVA Online fall and spring semesters have the largest number of course sections to prepare with approximately 1,200 course sections each and over 550 distinct faculty in any given semester. Fewer sessions are offered during the summer semester, usually 75% of the fall or spring semester sessions.
| Semester | Course Creation Date | 1st Start Date |
| Fall | 3rd week of June | 3rd Monday of August |
| Spring | 3rd week of October | 2nd Monday of January |
| Summer | 3rd week of March | 3rd Monday of May |
Both online and campus course sections are created at the same time. This factor combined with the course preparation process drives the dates listed above. Courses being revised with the instructional design team are put on hold and created later in the cycle. The majority of the master copies of courses are ready when our LMS administrator initiates course creation for the upcoming semester.
Timeline Details
The NOVA Online Course Preparation Annual Timeline highlights the continuous annual cycle NOVA Online follows for course copies, NOVA Online preparation, faculty preparation, and live courses.
- Upcoming semester sections are created by Canvas's integration with MyNOVA approximately eight weeks before the semester's first start date.
- MyNOVA and scheduling changes are ongoing and are usually reflected in Canvas sections within a day.
- NOVA Online instructional design support staff complete NOVA Online preparation steps for all online sections, including:
- Publisher setup and publisher sharing and configuration for courses using publisher tools.
- Cartridge loading for courses using publisher cartridge content.
- Ensuring OER and special sections contain the correct content.
- Setting exam passes for each instructor assigned to a section.
- Confirming that all proctored exams are password protected.
- Checking each section to make sure the Grade Center is intact.
- Sections are checked and prepared in start date order. Sections with later start dates may not be ready for faculty as early as the sections with earlier start dates.
- Faculty can begin preparing their section after they receive an email from Online ID Help that their course site is ready.
- Faculty follow the course preparation checklist in the "section is ready" email, which outlines items to edit before making the course site available to students.
- Faculty will not see student enrollments in their course sites when new semester sections are first created.
- If a course section is designated as SSDL, SSDL enrollments are merged with NOVA Online sections and faculty do not need to perform any setup in the SSDL sections.
- NOVA Online critical dates may not be the same as NOVA campus dates, and NOVA Online faculty should always follow NOVA Online critical dates.
- Faculty prepare and open sections to students, preferably by 7 a.m. on a session's start date.
- Semester start dates are staggered throughout a semester. The semester's first start date, indicated by the largest star on the timeline above, is when the largest number of sections open for the semester.