Prospectus
The Prospectus contains an overview of all study programmes and courses offered by Leiden University. It is important to keep the information about your course up to date.
Timeline and deadlines for updating the prospectus are coming soon. Deadlines may differ per study programme. Contact your coordinator for the deadlines.
[Last update: June 2025]
Take these steps to update the Prospectus
Open your page in the browser or use the template you received from your coordinator.
- Check whether all properties (course load, language) are filled in correctly. You may not be allowed to make changes to some elements as per instructions from your coordinator.
- Check whether all required sections are filled in correctly.
Read your current course description and try to answer the following three questions.
If you can’t, your description is incomplete and you can complete it with step 2b.
- Does the course description describe what you actually teach in this course?
- Is it clear for students why it is important to follow this course in their study programme?
- Is it clear how you teach students? Which overall learning activities do students take part in?
No course description yet or want to re-write your text? Write down three sentences in answer to each of the three questions below.
- How would you summarise what you teach in this course in keywords?
- Why is it important for students to follow my course in their study programme?
- How are you going to teach your students? Which overall learning activities do students take part in?
You can then structure your course description along different storylines.
Read your draft with your audience in mind: would you be excited to follow this course?
To ensure that your description does not only explain what you do in the course, but also motivates students to take the course, you can tweak the style of the description a little more.
- Use you instead the student.
- Use little jargon.
- Provide the full terminology first, then the abbreviation.
- Use an enthusiastic tone.
- Keep it between 200 en 300 words.
Use GenAI to turn a dry description into an enthusiastic one!
The learning objectives of your course should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely. As these objectives are part of the Prospectus, they are also a part of the OER.
Consult the learning objective guidelines (on the right) to check or formulate your objectives.
Your course should be constructively aligned and this should also be apparent from your Prospectus page.
Course objectives - Teaching and learning activities
What students are meant to learn should be found in the objectives and the course description. The descirption should provide more details about what students will do during the course to be able to achieve the objectives.
Teaching and learning activities - Assessment
What students do during the course should be related to the assessment. Everthing you test should be past of the subject matter and activities of the course.
Assessment - Course objectives
Finally, your assessment should match your objectives, skills included. All objectives must be assessed (summatively or formatively).
Once you have checked and improved your course description and objectives, you might have to make some adjustments to other sections of the Prospectus page as well, e.g. the assessment. For this section, you can best consult with your Board of Examiners to ensure that you include all necessary information about the form and weight of assessment components.
There are also some sections that should never be changed because they are filled in for the entire faculty. If you have questions about the Prospectus page and/or the template, contact your programme coordinator.