April 24, 2020

With all the planning going on for the delivery of remote/online courses in the summer and perhaps beyond, we are hearing from many instructors and departments that they have an interest in using additional tools for teaching – whether for real-time video calls, or assessment tools, or asynchronous discussion tools. As such, we thought it would be a good time to remind people of our Provostial guidelines on using such tools where no formal contract exists between the University and the tool provider that protects privacy and intellectual property. Specifically, “full reliance on a third party service that is not supported by the institution or division, nor through an contract relationship will involve a high level of risk and is not recommended as a primary learning environment, in particular for fully online courses. However, if faculty members wish to take advantage of the benefits of Web 2.0 or Cloud-based technologies as an adjunct activity to enhance a course they should comply with the following directives to reduce the risk in use of third party systems – https://teaching.utoronto.ca/ed-tech/online-learning/toolkit/engaging-students-online/beyond-quercus/cloud/ -“