Sidecar Courses

Your proposal must be submitted online using the form and include the following information:

Submit your proposal

1. Names and contact information for both faculty members.
2. One-paragraph description of your proposed class, including a course title.
3. A short statement describing how you will involve your IDEAS fellow TAs in planning and teaching the course.
4. (Optional) Name of IDEAS fellows to serve as Teaching Assistants. If you already know IDEAS fellows that you would like to work with, please include their names. This proposal needn’t be fully developed at this point, as we would like to see IDEAS fellows involved in the planning process.
5. Meeting time. Include a time that will work for both faculty members. We strongly suggest that you avoid times between 10 and 2 on Mondays-Thursdays. These times are fully scheduled by regular classes, so enrollments are likely to be low, and it is difficult to find spaces or TAs during these times. If your course will require outside activities in the evenings or on weekends, please specify this in your course description.
6. If you require the course be Permission Only, explain why this is necessary for your sidecar. Because issuing permission numbers places an undue burden on our staff, we request that courses be open enrollment if at all possible.

Applications will be reviewed by the IDEAS Sidecar committee.

Successful applications will be paired with IDEAS fellows by the IDEAS Sidecar committee if you have not indicated fellows who would like to participate in the course. 

Successful applicants will meet with their full team, including IDEAS fellows, and submit a course description for OPUS and a full course outline.

A sidecar course brings together two professors from different departments who bring different perspectives to a particular topic, question or problem to create a short interdisciplinary course. As an example, a history professor interested in the Middle Ages might partner with a biology professor who focuses on infectious disease for a sidecar course on the plague. Sidecar courses are meant to add something to the curriculum that helps students integrate ideas from different fields and allows them to explore a topic both more deeply and more creatively.

The sidecar course will be listed as Open Enrollment unless instructors request otherwise, allowing any interested students to register. These courses are meant to be small and pedagogically innovative. Students take the course S/U, and each sidecar course carries one credit. Schedules for the class could be flexible, as long as the class meets often enough to justify receiving one credit (a total of 15 hours over the course of the semester). While courses can meet on an unconventional schedule, the registrar asks that they conform to the published schedule whenever possible and avoid “prime time” period, between 10 am – 2 pm; also, please avoid scheduling across two defined slots in the published schedule. Courses that require non-standard schedules should be held on Fridays.  Course content can be innovative and creative; courses could be run as a seminar, or they could be project or community service based, or they could include visiting discussants or lecturers, or whatever your imaginations conjure up.

Questions? Contact Kim Loudermilk or Peter Wakefield

• Attend an instructor and TA luncheon 
• Offer sidecar course once during a previous semester
• Submit a brief report upon completion of the course, which addresses positive aspects of the experience, aspects of the program that were less successful and suggestions for improving the program.