The planner is currently open for Winter 2025 courses and closes for editing on Friday June 6, 2025. Please use the same process for requesting winter session offerings as you use for summer session offerings by entering your program’s request into MAUI by May 23, 2025. 

As a reminder, Winter Session 2025 runs from Monday, December 22, 2025 to Friday, January 16, 2026 (note that the session starts right after the Fall 2025 semester ends and the session ends right before the start of the Spring 2026 semester). 

During the winter session, there are classes scheduled over four weeks but several university holidays within the time frame as well, so there are fewer than 20 instructional days.

Goal: The goal of CLAS offerings in winter session is to provide online CLAS Core courses to students who may be wanting to make progress toward graduation in Spring 2026 or Summer 2026 and also to stay on track with their program of study.

• Courses should provide high-quality and engaging learning modules. While instructors can chose to have a fully asynchronous modality, given the short overall duration of the session, adding a few required synchronous meetings each week can improve student engagement and success. 
• We strongly encourage winter session instructors to work with the instructional designers at Distance and Online Education to provide the highest quality learning experience for students during this very short duration session. 
• Courses should be 2 or 3 s.h. and help students progress toward graduation.
• Coursea that fulfill one of the GE CLAS Core area requirements are strongly preferred. In particular, CLAS is interested in offering courses in the Natural Sciences, Qualitative and Formal Reasoning categories and courses that help to meet the Sustainability requirement. 
• Courses should be offered as stand-alone sections; courses that typically have labs or discussions will not be offered in that format during winter session.

Instruction: Winter session courses may be taught by Instructional Track Faculty, Visitors or Adjuncts.

• Instructors will be compensated according to the CLAS summer (and winter) salary chart. Please see policy at this link: https://policy.clas.uiowa.edu/clas-policies-and-procedures/faculty/summerwinter-salary-teaching-course-new.
• Please discuss the use of Teaching Assistants with AD Lang and prior to adding the course in the course planner.

Enrollment: Winter courses are required to have a minimum enrollment cap of 30 and a maximum of 100. Historical offerings show that many courses do well with enrollments set to 40. Please reach out to AD Lang with questions related to course enrollments.

• The college reserves the right to cancel courses with enrollment less than 20.
• The course planner is open for editing for Winter Session and closes on June 6, 2025.

Process: Note that we now use a process for winter session course requests that is similar to the process for summer session. 

• If your department has a course and instructor that meet the criteria outlined above for Winter Session 2025, please enter all course information into the MAUI offerings planner by May 23, 2025. 
• CLAS leadership will review all proposed courses in the offerings planner and CLAS Finance will provide the final winter session approved budget to those departments that have approved courses by June 3, 2025. 
• CLAS plans to offer about 20 courses for the 2025 session due to the increased retention rates of CLAS students in order to help students make timely progress to graduation. 

Questions? Please contact AD Cornelia Lang.

Note: this memo was also published on May 7, 2025.