April 6, 2020

Like almost all North American schools (and many around the world), we’ve had to switch the way we teach and learn due to the Covid-19 pandemic. That means significant increases in the use of technology, and in demand for support around those technologies. In a series of posts, we will be sharing some visualizations of those changes.

At UofT, we have a URL shortening service that allows people with www.utoronto.ca websites to create direct, short (uoft.me) links, especially for marketing and communication purposes. Since the decision to move teaching and work into a remote mode, we’ve had more than 50 new unique short URLs created to point to Covid-19 related websites. The majority of those are to official news stories coming out of the University, but others have been using the service to make it easier for students and faculty to find information.

This word cloud paints a picture of the top sites (by number of clicks on the short URL) using the shortening service – the top five news stories, and the top five other webpages. Below we provide the links to those webpages for those who’d like to see where the links lead 🙂

https://uoft.me/mar13 • https://uoft.me/5fN • https://uoft.me/5fs • https://uoft.me/covidutsc • https://uoft.me/5fZ • https://uoft.me/5fv • https://uoft.me/ecf-covid19 • https://uoft.me/5fV • https://uoft.me/5ep • https://uoft.me/coronavirus-FAQ • https://uoft.me/student-faqs