Project Communique: March 6, 2018

Hello everyone,

You are receiving this email because you have been identified as the Toolbox Renewal Initiative Key Communication Contact (TBRKCC) for your Division to lead the project communication with your division. I am CCing the Toolbox Renewal Technical and Training Leads (TBRTTL) at each Division as well.

Jan/Feb Update

For the month of January and February, our focus has been raising awareness about the project and portal going away on Aug 31, 2018. We have attended 21 one hour long information session at different divisions providing project information and high level demo of Quercus. 

Furthermore, we are also attending departmental meetings for 5-10 minutes (please see Avi Hyman message enclosed) to deliver two key messages to faculty members:

1- Use your Sandbox at q.utoronto.ca to explore the new LME (all instructors have a sandbox, email us if you are not an instructor but need one at including your UTORID) 

2- You will no longer have access to portal after Aug 31, 2018, ensure you have archived all of courses’ content

We have developed an essential information page for the instructors on our website. Kindly direct your instructors to this site which also includes the porta/quercus comparison chart:

https://toolboxrenewal.utoronto.ca/instructor-info/

Also, Faculty of Art and Science has developed a visual guide for backing up course content that I have attached for your reference (and to be shared with your community). 

We will start the divisional and central training in April and will work with you to coordinate our divisional training sessions. 

Next steps are:

1) If you like us to hold additional information sessions at your division please email us to arrange the time

2) Send out reminder emails to your community to back up their course content and direct them to https://toolboxrenewal.utoronto.ca/instructor-info/

3) Collaborate with your divisional Technical and Training Lead to develop your divisional strategy for training and reach out to us to coordinate with our team to attend (we will be reaching out directly to the Technical and Training leads to plan for divisional training as well)

Summary:

At this point the focus has shift to advising instructors to back up all their course content. Fall course shells will become available by May 2018. For now courses can be build in sandboxes and easily be transferred to the course shell once they become available. End user training will start in April. 

Furthermore, we are offering content migration assistants for content migration and more information will be send out shortly. If your division has resources to support instructors with content migration we can provide training to them. Some divisions have considered hiring work study students to support this initiative. 

Please visit our website for more information  at https://toolboxrenewal.utoronto.ca/ 

Thank you

Haniyeh Yousofpour, PhD, MBA, PMP

Toolbox Renewal Project Manager

Project Website: https://toolboxrenewal.utoronto.ca/

 

From: Avi
To: Divisional Contacts

Hi all. As many of you know, We’ve started visiting departments directly. We try to find out when they are holding their ‘all-faculty’ meetings and get on their agendas for five minutes. Our message is simple – Quercus exists, log in; back-up your Portal course content. The goal is to get to as many instructors as we can.

We are happy include our divisional colleagues in the visits of course. To help you with that, here is a link to the schedule – as we get an invite, we update the schedule. We will also let you know in advance by email any time we get booked in to a meeting:  https://utoronto-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/andrea_eccleston_utoronto_ca/EdrEs0l75BhGkHIHhsvVij0BfLrEubWLvNIsq3Y4kNPz5A?e=QUPmQv