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/

* Please share widely * The Learning Portal is Changing! Our current Learning Portal hasn’t changed much in the last decade. Feedback from the University community is that the web interface for the Portal is clunky and out of date, and it doesn’t flow the way people would like. It’s also hard for instructors to … Read More

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

For the past few years, UofT has been working towards a new model of deploying educational technologies, and the ‘new idea’ recommendation service called Integrate allows instructors, students and staff to suggest ideas, and then allows other members of the community to show their support for those ideas by casting a ‘like vote.’ Read more about … Read More

For several months, the University has been working towards issuing an RFP for a Learning Management Engine, a core piece of our Academic Toolbox Renewal Initiative. A key process of the LME RFP will be a chance for members of the UofT community to “test drive” a select number of solutions that make it through … 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

Dr. Haniyeh Yousofpour has recently joined the ITS Project Management Office, and among her other activities, she has been assigned PM responsibilities for the next phase of our Academic Toolbox Renewal initiative. Haniyeh has a doctoral degree in Human Resource Management and Organizational Behaviour and an MBA with Finance Concentration. Further, she is a certified … Read More

I am pleased to let the community know that Dr. Kimberley MacKinnon has accepted a formal role to work with the ACT group, providing us with ongoing scholarly input, expertise and analysis, particularly around the Academic Toolbox Renewal initiative (http://toolboxrenewal.act.utoronto.ca) and tool integration process. Dr. MacKinnon will provide the team with scholarly guidance as we … Read More

NB: Opinion ahead; proceed with caution 😉   I have a wonderful colleague, Sian Meikle, Director of Information Technology for the University of Toronto Libraries. Sian uses a wonderful meme – “tool monoculture” – the idea that there is a one-size-fits-all technology culture. I think this is a brilliantly descriptive meme for the state of … Read More

I was in a meeting yesterday, and we were talking about the Toolbox Renewal, and trying to think of other analogies that may help folks understand the objective. Perhaps the relationship between a mobile operating system and mobile apps is a good analogy for our toolbox. The educational tools we choose/use are to the toolbox, … Read More