Active Quercus Courses

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.

In the graph above, you can see the number of active (in use) Quercus course shells this year (note the jump at the start of each semester). Active course shells include shells mapped to specific courses as populated from our Student Information System, plus “sandbox” course shells given automatically to every instructor (for experimentation), and manually created course shells (either for real teaching or experimentation). Note that there is a relatively small increase associated with onset of Covid-related teaching changes, but not as much of a slope as with other services. We are choosing to interpret this as a sign that adoption of our main teaching environment, even as a document repository, was already reasonably high, which hopefully means that the jump to all online teaching wasn’t as big a jump as it might have been if instructors weren’t already familiar with Quercus, even if only partially.

If you are at UofT and would like to learn more about making use of Quercus for your teaching, now or in the future, please start here: http://uoft.me/qresources

PS – for those of you outside UofT, Quercus is our ‘branded’ instance of the Canvas LMS