Letter to LS&A Students Concerning the Course Guide

We are writing to notify you that the College of LS&A is publishing, effective immediately, its traditional COURSE GUIDES only in an online version at our Student Academic Affairs website: http://www.lsa.umich.edu/saa/

The GUIDES have been available online for a number of years, with gradual improvements made each year, and the online usage has grown dramatically with each improvement. While we recognize that this change may be a minor inconvenience, we believe that the benefits far outweigh the difficulty. Among the many benefits offered by the online Spring/Summer and Fall COURSE GUIDES are:

- earlier access to the information; for example, the Spring/Summer COURSE GUIDE has been available online since February 16, six weeks earlier than the printed book was ever available, and the Fall GUIDE is now online, more than one week earlier

- instant access, with just one click of your mouse, to the course times, locations, and availability

- reliable accuracy of the information you see, since the GUIDE will be continually updated with all deletions, changes, and additions to the course database as they occur

- instant access to departmental or program homepages, and, as notice of any course and/or faculty webpages is received, a link will be established immediately

- course descriptions no longer limited to the 150 words allowed for print.

In the longer view, staff time in our publications office will now be available to develop further benefits such as search engines, for example, so that if you want a list of all courses with the word "China" or "Holocaust" or some other key word in the description you can get that list, or, if you want to know what courses Professor X is teaching you can get that information. We hope to have some of these additional benefits available by late summer.

The online COURSE GUIDE is a living document, continually growing and changing. While you may feel the need to print a single description or entire division, subsequent changes will make your printouts outdated. The COURSE GUIDES are maintained in an archive forever. Any description for a course you elect will always be available for your instant access; in fact, our site has course descriptions for LS&A back through 1982.

If you are convinced you need printed copy, feel free to print a division or department, or, make text clippings to the word processor of your choice. Since we will have the full COURSE GUIDE in Adobe® PDF format, you will also be able to print page ranges.

We hope you can see that the benefits of the online COURSE GUIDE are many, and we wish you success in finding what you need and want as you plan your course schedules for the Spring, Summer, and Fall. If you have any questions or need help, please address your inquiries by e-mail to: SAA.Webmaster@umich.edu

Esrold A. Nurse	Robert D. Wallin
Assistant Dean	Director
LS&A Student Academic Affairs	Academic Information & Publications