Institutional Strategist for Academic Technology, U of T

Avi Hyman, B.Sc., M.A., Ed.D.
Director of Academic & Collaborative Technology, UofT
Institutional Strategist for Academic Technology, CTSI
Tel: 416-978-5815
a.hyman (at) utoronto.ca

Avi Hyman is the University of Toronto’s Director of Academic & Collaborative Technologies, and Institutional Strategist for Academic Technologies in the Centre for Teaching Support & Innovation.

He is an anthropologist with a doctoral degree from OISE. For the past couple of decades he has been fortunate to have positions which have allowed him to both think strategically about technology in higher education, and also have the opportunity to actualize ideas on an operational day-to-day level. Prior to taking on that kind of role for the University of Toronto as a whole, Avi served as director of academic technology for the Faculty of Medicine, and before that OISE.

Functionally, Avi is responsible for providing strategic and tactical leadership in the development and implementation of information technology services that support the academic mission of Canada’s largest university, and one of the top ten universities in the world.

He works with faculty, students, academic administrators, and teaching support and instructional technology units to advance the University’s academic mission and in particular, its commitment to teaching.

There is also a certain duality in his current position. Avi is a member of University of Toronto’s Centre for Teaching Support and Innovation (CTSI), as well as part of the University of Toronto’s CIO’s Office, in the central university’s Information and Technology Services (I+TS) portfolio.

When time permits, Avi teaches (as an associate faculty member in the Department of Theory & Policy Studies in Education) and does some research. His doctoral work was a longitudinal study of how faculty and graduate students used technology to create professional social networks (although at the time, they weren’t called social networks). A recent project involves geotagging old manhole covers in Toronto and connecting the metadata to historical records of urban development found in the City Archives and UofT Map Library. Ask him why if you are curious 🙂

Specialties
Thinking Outside the Box and Brokering Relationships. Please contact Avi if you have any questions or thoughts about academic technologies, eLearning, teaching online or anything else for that matter