2015 – ACTion

The Anatomy Glove Learning System: From the UofT to Around the World

Professors Pat McKee and Anne Agur are veteran educators in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine. While their passion is for teaching, creating a start-up company called Anatomy Softwear International Inc. turned them into entrepreneurs. Their invention, the Anatomy Glove Learning System, is now used in over 30 educational programs in over a dozen […]

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DeckChair Lets Students Cruise Through Learning

articles / Aaron Yellin

Dr. Jeff Graham teaches psychology at the University of Toronto Mississauga, the place where one can see DeckChair, Graham’s online learning program, in action. It’s a tool he sees changing the landscape of education. The original program was developed in 2002, as a simple tool for running surveys and experiments with first-year psychology students. It

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How the ITIF Helped Maureen Barry

articles / Aaron Yellin

Maureen Barry was used to teaching a small undergrad nursing class at U of T. A group of 30 or so students would gather around, and she’d hold up a syringe, or demonstrate in front of a mannequin, or whatever they were doing that day. It’s how things were always done—until her accelerated program got

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Sim Lab: Pioneering Technology in Nursing Education

articles / Jonah Goldberg

Professor Maureen Barry may be a nurse-educator first and foremost, but she is also one the University of Toronto’s, and Canada’s, foremost educational technology pioneers. She is a big fan of hands-on learning, and her simulation program is the premiere example of that approach. Professor Barry began her career in Nursing as an undergraduate student at

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Teaching a Course of 25,000 Students: Charmaine Williams’ Experiment with MOOCs

articles / Jonah Goldberg

Imagine taking a university course with close to 25,000 students from all across the world, with enrolment stretching from Brazil to Switzerland and all the way back to Canada. For those of us who thought first year courses in Convocation Hall were large, Professor Charmaine Williams has taught a class twenty times the size

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Flipping the Classroom and Making It Relevant

articles / Aaron Yellin

The infinite refrain of the unwilling math student is “when am I ever going to need to know this?” And no matter how dismissive it may be, if you’re teaching a college math course, it’s a useful question to answer. In pursuit of that answer, U of T statistical sciences professor Alison Gibbs helped introduce

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Introducing Students to Digital Humanities

articles / Ken Kongkatong

It’s difficult to imagine a world without digital technologies. After all, in this digital age almost everything whether in a small or large capacity incorporates some form of technology. This is highly evident in academia where non-technical fields such as history are attempting to integrate technology into academic scholarship. The new undergraduate third-year history course

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COIL

articles / Ken Kongkatong

Heather MacNeill is a doctor, but she’s also a teacher. And her classes are using an innovative way to help solve some of the toughest diseases doctors every need to face. MacNeill, a professor of Physiatry in the Department of Medicine at U of T, currently helms the Collaborative Online Interprofessional Learning (COIL) Program at

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A Smarter Proficiency Test

articles / Aaron Yellin

In Canada, placing French language students in university programs is a bit more complicated than other countries. With such a wide variety of French speakers, finding the right level for each one becomes more important, and more difficult. French Professor Jeffrey Steele wanted to design a placement test for incoming French students at U of

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Gaming in an Alternative Reality: Ballon’s vision of making Mental Health Known

articles / Gillian Grossman

Back in 2006, Dr. Bruce Ballon, an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UofT, was the mastermind behind creating the Multiple Interacting Reality Alternative Generated Environment, MIRAGE for short, as a way for people to experience how perception affects behaviour through role playing. The game came out of the SAGE (Situation and Gaming

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