Unizin partner universities include a number of official UO comparator institutions.
The Unizin Consortium is a member-owned (10 founding investor institutions, all large public R1 universities), invitation-only consortium designed to further cross-institutional partnerships and provide control over the digital education ecosystem, lower costs, establish alignment with standards and generate valuable, real-time data, while eliminating technical barriers.
Unizin’s founding members.
Unizin is a member-driven effort to coordinate strategies within “the digital learning landscape” and allow member institutions (staff, faculty, and students) “to draw on an evolving set of tools to support digital learning for residential, flipped classroom, online courses/degrees, badged experiences for Alumni, and MOOCs” (including Canvas. Unizin is closely connected to the Internet2 initiative. Founding institutions include: Colorado State University, Indiana University, University of Florida, University of Michigan, Oregon State University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ohio State University, University of Iowa, Pennsylvania State University, and University of Minnesota.
Unizin’s primary goal is to use size/scale to leverage affordable access to a wide suite of tools for select universities invited to invest and participate in the consortium (based on interest and an ability to contribute money and other resources), as well as to deeply improve the analytics associated with that suite of tools. Collaboration is most successful if all involved agree on a vision, and then use that vision to build in metrics to measure progress.
Unizin Director Amin Qazi speaks at OSU, May 2015.
Unizin’s ideological framework is based on a tripartite model:
Content: access to relevant learning objects.
Analytics: standardized data from platforms, content utilization in a speedy and reliable method.
Platform: flexible, standardized tool providing shared content, applications, and data. Canvas is currently used, but other tools may be implemented in the future.
