by Marco Di Vittorio Manager, Application Administration Academic & Collaborative Technologies (ACT) Most traffic moves slower during a snow storm. Pedestrian, vehicle and airline routes typically grind to a halt when large white flakes flood the ground in high volumes. Web traffic on the other hand, can exhibit a very different pattern during the same … Read More

A new semester is upon us, and we now move into our second full semester in our new teaching environment Quercus. As with all new systems, there can be a bit of a learning curve, especially for some of the quirkier parts of the system. We’ve set up a web page where we will be … Read More

The University of Toronto is committed to continuing its leadership in digital learning and providing resources to our faculty, librarians, staff, and students that assist them in pursuing excellence in their teaching and learning. An effective suite of educational technology software – a digital academic toolbox – is essential to that work. The University has … Read More

Our student newspaper, The Varsity, has been covering our Academic Toolbox Renewal Initiative. Read what they have to say: The Portal to the Future (Feb. 2016) http://thevarsity.ca/2016/02/01/the-portal-to-the-future/ UofT Seeks New Learning Portal (Sept. 2016) http://thevarsity.ca/2016/09/12/u-of-t-seeks-new-learning-portal/

As many of you know, the University of Toronto has been going through an extensive process we’ve been calling our ‘Academic Toolbox Renewal.’ As part of that process, we recently posted an RFP for a ‘Learning Management Engine’ – which is our attempt to actualize the theoretical model defined in Brown, Dehoney and Millichap’s seminal … Read More

We were just skimming our monthly Google Analytics numbers for the Portal. We are on pace to surpass 40 million sessions this year (based on currently monthly numbers). But even more interesting, over the past month, we had sessions from 166 different countries! Other than Canada, the top ten countries are the U.S.A., the UK, … Read More

Our group continues to get calls about building websites for departments, so I wanted to clarify what we do and don’t do here in ACT. We are responsible for deploying and maintaining enterprise web services (EWS), but we don’t actually build or manage websites (“webmastering”). Let me use Microsoft and PowerPoint as an analogy. Microsoft … Read More

A couple of our colleagues, Fareed Teja and Simone Laughton, recently suggested that it would be great to have a place to list pilot projects being conducted by different units around the university. It might help with collaborative efforts (or save someone time if a pilot was already being conducted). It could even lead to … Read More

A number of instructors at UofT are interested in using various teaching and learning tools produced by various publishers, especially for assessment activities. In many cases, instructors have asked us to integrate those tools into our overall educational technology ecosystem. Integrating a third-party tool has many layers of complexity – technical integration, integration with our … Read More

Innovative approaches to teaching and learning are evident throughout the University of Toronto. People at UofT are constantly discovering (or sometimes building) and evaluating new applications that enhance teaching and support student learning. While instructors try out apps, websites and services that may be appropriate for their own teaching contexts, there are overall institutional contexts … Read More