Use this quick guide to get started with Quercus and find guidance for preparing and teaching your course.
What is Quercus?
Quercus is the University of Toronto’s learning management system (LMS), powered by Canvas. Instructors can use Quercus to share course materials, communicate with students, create activities and assessments, and manage grades.
Log In to Quercus
Go to q.utoronto.ca and log in with your UTORid and password.
Need Help Accessing Quercus?
- New instructors: Your UTORid is required to access Quercus. Your Business Officer (or, in some faculties and departments, your Human Resources Officer) can issue your UTORid and Secret Activation Key. Learn more about activating your UTORid.
- Visiting and status-only instructors: If you do not appear in HRIS, ask your Business Officer or ROSI Coordinator to apply for a Long-Term Guest UTORid on your behalf.
- UTORid or password issues: Contact the Information Commons Help Desk.
- Change your display name: Update your preferred display name at my.auth.utoronto.ca. Changes may take 24–48 hours to appear in Quercus.
Access Your Courses
After logging in to Quercus, your courses should appear on your Dashboard. If a course is missing, confirm that:
- You have active status in HRIS; and
- The course has been created in ROSI and you are assigned as an instructor to the appropriate section.
Contact your Business Officer, divisional Human Resources Officer, or departmental ROSI Coordinator if this information needs to be updated. Changes made in ROSI or HRIS may take 24–48 hours to appear in Quercus.
Quercus courses follow an automated Course Lifecycle that affects when instructors and students can access courses.
Faculty and staff at the Federated Colleges: Contact your Divisional Quercus support to be manually added to your courses, as instructor information is not automatically provided to Quercus through ROSI.
Sandbox Courses
A Quercus sandbox course is automatically created for instructors with an active teaching assignment in ROSI. Sandbox courses do not include student enrolments or course codes and provide a space to explore and try Quercus tools and features.
Faculty and staff at the Federated Colleges: Contact your Divisional Quercus support to request a sandbox course.
Build Your Course
Set up your Quercus course so students can easily find and access the information, materials, and activities they need.
Set Up Your Course
Before adding or updating course content, review your course settings and structure.
- Cross-list course sections: Combine enrolments from multiple course sections into a single Quercus course.
- Reuse content from a previous course: Import content from another Quercus course into your new course shell.
- Choose a course home page: Select what students see when they first enter your course.
- Customize Course Navigation: Choose which links appear in Course Navigation and arrange them to help students find what they need.
- Use Student View: Preview your course from a student’s perspective to check course content and navigation.
- Publish your course: Students can access your course only after it has been published.
Looking for ideas? Explore examples of existing public Quercus course sites.
Add and Organize Course Content
Use Modules to organize course materials and activities in a sequence that students can navigate. Use Pages to present instructions, text, links, images, and other course content. Make sure individual course items are published when you are ready for students to access them.
The Rich Content Editor is available when creating Pages and many other types of content in Quercus. Use it to format text and add links, images, media, and other content.
- Modules and Pages: Two methods of presenting course content
- Use the Rich Content Editor
Design for Accessibility
Create course content that is accessible to students using different devices and assistive technologies. When adding content in Quercus, use accessible headings, descriptive link text, alternative text for images, and accessible tables and other content structures.
Use the built-in Accessibility Checker in the Rich Content Editor to identify and address common accessibility issues.
Manage People in Your Course
Use People to add TAs, additional instructors, and other course staff to your course. Course roles determine what each person can access and do in Quercus.
The People link does not need to be visible in Course Navigation unless students need to use it, such as for self-sign-up groups.
Communicate and Engage With Students
Use Quercus to communicate with students and create opportunities for interaction and collaboration.
Communicate With Students
Use Announcements to send course-wide updates and Inbox to send messages to individual students or groups. Students receive notifications of announcements only after the course has been published.
Student-to-student Inbox conversations are disabled at the course level but are available within groups to support group collaboration.
Support Student Collaboration
Use Discussions to create asynchronous opportunities for students to contribute and interact with one another. Consider how you will provide instructions, facilitate participation, and monitor discussions throughout the activity.
Use Groups to organize students for collaborative activities. Groups provide students with their own space in Quercus for discussions, file sharing, and other group work.
Assess Student Learning
Use Quercus to create and manage assessments, provide feedback, and share grades with students.
Create Assessments
Use Assignments to collect student work and manage submission dates, instructions, and grading. Use Quizzes to create online quizzes, tests, and other assessments in Quercus.
When using Quercus Quizzes, review the available accessibility and accommodation options to support student access to assessments.
Grade and Provide Feedback
Use the Gradebook to enter and manage grades and control when grades are visible to students. Use SpeedGrader to review student submissions, provide feedback, and assign grades.
You can also use Assignment Groups to organize assessments and weight groups of assessments, set a grading scheme for your course, and choose whether students can see their total course grade.
Final grades: Do not publish final grades in Quercus. Official final grades are distributed to students by the University Registrar’s Office through ROSI/ACORN.
Get Help and Find More Resources
For help with Quercus, contact your Divisional Quercus support. Instructors teaching large-enrolment courses can also review considerations for large courses and Quercus system performance.
For additional start-of-term guidance, review:
- Instructor Quercus Start-of-Term Checklist (Faculty of Arts & Science)
- Quercus Start-of-Term Checklist for Instructors (Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering)
- Start of Term Quercus Checklist (University of Toronto Scarborough)
- Quercus for Instructors Course Setup (University of Toronto Mississauga)
Looking for additional teaching and learning technologies? Explore the Academic Toolbox to find U of T-supported tools and guidance.