Author: Media Release | Date: 26 September 2016

HAMILTON, Ont. – Software developer Orbis Communications has announced that it will be working with the University of Toronto on a project designed to link students with university and industry research opportunities in one online destination.



The project is creating a new way for the school to catalogue all undergraduate research opportunities for students at the university and with industry partners. The platform works by listing all faculty and industry partners’ research opportunities or projects in one place where students can search and see what interests them.



“This is something that can change the way students advance their education while simultaneously preparing themselves better for a career,” says Devin Grady, co-founder of Orbis Communications. “The idea is to give students more chances for experiential education by cataloguing the thousands of often hidden or hard to find research opportunities that are available. These opportunities will help students gain valuable academic experience that they may have missed out on before.”



Orbis, which works with dozens of other schools across North America, including UC San Diego and University of British Columbia, is one of the few companies in the world developing software solutions to better link students with academic institutions and the larger labour market.



U of T’s platform, developed by Orbis, will list each opportunity and include the skills and competencies that the student will build by being part of the research team. In the near future, students will be able to include these opportunities on their Co-Curricular Transcript, which when paired with their academic transcript, provides a more well-rounded view of a student’s institutional learning.



The research opportunities will cover most departments, providing chances for students to perform research in more common fields as well as those that are much more niche, such as Immunology, Language in Education in Western Kenya, Heritage languages in Toronto and much more.



“The value of this platform comes down to how it benefits student learning at the research level,” says Eva Jurczyk, Coordinator, Research Catalogue at the University of Toronto. “Many undergraduate students don’t get the opportunity to take part in research in their field and that’s partly because it is sometimes difficult to discover the opportunities. This new platform changes this and gives students the chance to learn more and better prepare themselves for a future career.”



Orbis’ work with post-secondary institutions goes back to 2001 when it was the first company to introduce Canadian Co-Curricular Record (CCR) software to organize, track and manage the CCR process, complete with ties to documented learning outcomes. Since then, schools across North America are utilizing the platforms to not only track student progress in an academic process but also looking at how it can be expanded to help students land their first job out of school.



