Plan your course selection
- If you’re a full-time student, you would usually take five courses in the fall term and five in the winter term. If you’d like to enrol in a sixth course in a given term or a seventh if you are in engineering, you must first get permission from your faculty.
- Choose your compulsory and optional courses first. This part is easiest because most of these choices are already made for you.
- Choose your electives. Take your time when deciding because there are a lot of courses available in a multitude of disciplines. Select courses according to your interests and your desired timetable.
- Make sure to maintain a good balance of compulsory, optional and elective courses throughout your studies.
To be considered a full-time student, you must enrol in at least 12 units (normally four courses) each term. Generally, students enrol in five courses each term to complete their degree in four years.
Course offering
Programs are offered in English and in French. It should be noted that some courses are not offered each term.
Electives
If you’ve never taken a university course or if you don’t have the prerequisites for a specific discipline, check out the list of electives without prerequisites, read the descriptions and take note of the courses that interest you.
Language and make-up courses
If we’ve indicated in your offer of admission that you need to enrol in a second-language course or take a make-up course in mathematics or science, you will need to follow the enrolment process for Language and make-up courses.
If you’re interested in taking a modern language course (Arabic, Chinese, German, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian or Spanish), you will need to follow the process to enrol in modern language courses and perhaps pass a placement test first.
Course evaluations
Course evaluations completed by previous students can help you with your course selection. Students fill out a teaching evaluation questionnaire to evaluate all courses consisting of at least nine hours with the same professor. Once compiled, results are available in the S Report, which describes certain aspects of a professor's teaching methods. The report is available through uoZone, under Applications.
Students in the French Immersion Stream: You can contact an immersion mentor who can help you plan your course selection and go over all your options. You can also visit the French immersion website to find out more. You might be required or encouraged to enrol in a French as a second language course. In this case, the course will count as the sixth course in your term. Contact your faculty or the French immersion team for support.
Understand the course timetable tool and course components
The class timetable search tool allows you to find out when and where courses are offered. It displays all available sections for a given course.
A course is a pre-set package of academic activities (lectures, discussion groups, labs, etc.) identified by a specific course code and worth a specific number of units.
Each course code has two elements. The first is the discipline (subject) code and identifies the field of study (i.e., BIO for Biology). The second is the catalogue number (also referred to as course number in the Enrol application) and assigns each course a unique identifier.
Courses can comprise various academic activities, with each activity identified in a section code. The first letter of the section code groups activities of the same parent activity (usually a lecture). For example, in course code BIO 1130 A00, A00 represents a lecture. In BIO 1130 A01, A01 represents a laboratory. Both are academic activities in section A of course BIO 1130. Note that you cannot enrol in classes with overlapping schedules because it will create a timetable conflict, which is not permitted.
Some sections are reserved for students in certain programs. To know which sections are available to you, go to uoZone, under Applications, then Enrol. Once you’re on the enrol page, refer to the My Available Seats column in the search results.
The earliest course start time is 8:30 a.m. (some laboratory sessions may begin earlier) and the latest possible end time is 10 p.m. Some courses are offered on Saturdays.
Find out more about what makes up a course code, different course component types, and the various codes used at the University by consulting the Understanding course enrolment terminology page.
Create sample timetables
Once you have checked your program requirements and course sequences, planned your course selection and understood how the course timetable tool works, start to create sample timetables to get ready before the official course enrolment period begins. This way, you’ll have a better idea of courses you want to add to your timetable when you start enrolling.
Perform searches in the class timetable search tool (note that the course timetable for each term is available at least one week prior to enrolment). In addition, we encourage you to use the timetable template (printable PDF - 107KB). Create more than one draft timetable, since you have to prepare for both the Fall and Winter terms.
The timetable template is already divided into time slots based on the University of Ottawa’s class periods. Select more courses than you need and build different samples of your timetables in case there is a time conflict or a course is full. The more sample timetables you create, the easier it'll be for you to swap things here and there to come up with your final schedule.
Some courses may be restricted (limited number of spots, reserved for students in specific programs, etc.), so there is no guarantee a spot in these courses will be available, even if you meet all eligibility requirements.
If you have to enrol in make-up courses, put these in your timetable first, since they don't show up in your course sequence. After you've finished adding your make-up courses, put in your compulsory courses, followed by your optional and elective courses.
Wherever possible, enrol in all your compulsory 1000-level courses in first year, your 2000-level courses in second year, and so on. Since some programs don't have many compulsory 1000-level courses, you might end up taking some higher-level courses, either elective courses without prerequisites or other courses in your discipline, as long as you have the prerequisites.
