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 this post we show the massive, and almost instantaneous uptake of our enterprise webinar tool, Bb Collaborate, as our instructors looked to deliver synchronous live teaching as a replacement for in-class teaching. My colleague, Marco Di Vittorio published these graphs in near-real time today on Twitter – https://twitter.com/mduoft/status/1240371559551897602 – they are something to behold … especially the graph showing the jump from just a typical few hundred a day on March 12, to over 30,000 session attendees by March 17. And this number does not include those instructors who opted for MS Teams or their own Zoom rooms (Zoom is not an enterprise solution at UofT, although we are aware that some instructors and departments do use it).

Visualizations courtesy of Marco Di Vittorio, Manager of Application Administration, ACT

If you are at UofT and are interested in the Bb Collaborate Webinar tool, please start here with our support material (the tool is automatically available within your Quercus course shell):
https://q.utoronto.ca/courses/46670/pages/integration-blackboard-collaborate-ultra-web-conferencing