The formal launch of Unizin begins an exciting new chapter for Digital Education and a path for universities to shape our future. We have been fortunate to be among the many who have shaped the ideas that form Unizin, and our institutions are among the earliest universities to join. Our goals and purpose in endorsing Unizin are simple: As professors and members of the academy, we want to support faculty and universities by ensuring that universities and their faculty stay in control of the content, data, relationships, and reputations that we create. As we look at the rapidly emerging infrastructure that enables digital learning, we want to bias things in the direction of open standards, interoperability, and scale. Unizin is about tipping the table in favor of the academy by collectively owning (buying, developing, and connecting) the essential infrastructure that enables digital learning on our campuses and beyond

Hilton, James

Wheeler, Bradley C.

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Unizin Summit 2015 About
Why Unizin?
The formal launch of Unizin begins an exciting new
chapter for Digital Education and a path for universities to
shape our future. We have been fortunate to be among the
many who have shaped the ideas that form Unizin, and
our institutions are among the earliest universities to join.
Our goals and purpose in endorsing Unizin are simple: As
professors and members of the academy, we want to
support faculty and universities by ensuring that
universities and their faculty stay in control of the content,
data, relationships, and reputations that we create. As we
look at the rapidly emerging infrastructure that enables
digital learning, we want to bias things in the direction of
open standards, interoperability, and scale. Unizin is about
tipping the table in favor of the academy by collectively
owning (buying, developing, and connecting) the essential
infrastructure that enables digital learning on our
campuses and beyond.
Background
Digital Learning has risen to prominence with many who
care deeply about an educated society.  Catalyzed by the
emergence and widespread fascination with MOOCs, many
inside and outside the academy are asking about the
implications that Digital Learning has for both residential
and non-residential education at universities.  The
attention around MOOCs, in particular, has been so intense
that people are comparing the journey since 2012 to
Gartner’s famous “Hype Cycle.”  Early on, the focus was on
the new, exciting, and potentially transformative  impact
that digital education can have across the spectrum. But
as 2013 gave way to 2014, the hype cycle was clearly
headed toward disillusionment as some experiments were
abandoned and commentators focused on low completion
rates and faculty-voiced concerns regarding (a) the
efficacy of MOOCs in comparison, especially, to residential
education and (b) control of their intellectual property.
But digital education is more than MOOCs and more than a
passing fad. It’s everywhere and it’s growing. The physical
classroom is increasingly mediated/enabled/extended by
digital technology. We depend on technology to connect
with our students, to deliver content to them, and to assess
them. Indeed, it is becoming as essential to a residential
education as the bricks and mortar in which we dwell.
Thus, our view has always been to focus on the whole of
digital education.  In 2012, one of us (Brad and his CIC
colleagues) wrote a paper “Is This Time Different?” and
gave a keynote address to the Australian Innovative
Research Universities.  In both pieces, the primary theme
was the need to focus on the whole of how technical,
economic, and social trends might come together for
universities as we continue to (1) enhance the great value
of a residential education through techniques like Flipped
Classrooms; (2) extend learning beyond our campuses with
courses and degrees; (3) continue to educate our alumni
and others through badges and non-credit short course,
and (4) judiciously enable MOOC capabilities for our
faculty when they seek to educate the world.  They urged
near-term experimentation and setting a longer-term
strategy that aligned to the opportunities of an
increasingly digital university.
In the months that followed and through countless
conversations, it seemed clear that universities and
faculty would benefit from a means to control and shape
the technologies and services that enable some key parts
of Digital Education. These would include the increased
digitization of the Content that students/faculty use, the
Software Platforms that enable learner interactions via
lessons and courses, and the Analytics that may give
insight to enhance both Content and Software to improve
learning. Data-driven insights from analytics hold great
promise to enhance the ways we teach and even inform
our curricula.
It also became increasingly clear that isolated, single
campus-based approaches to deal with this path to scale
would not favor institutions; rather, it would shift control
and economic power to entities outside of academia that
develop and own technologies and services at scale.
 These owners would be able to assert the terms for use of
content and data on their platforms and would almost
certainly add new costs to universities. In that shift of
decision rights, long held faculty and student rights
regarding control of intellectual property and privacy
might no longer be decided in the Academy.
For universities, a path to scale could pose both great
opportunity and great risk. What have we learned from the
previous 20+ years as essential parts of our education and
research enterprise went to scale?
There are many different lessons beyond those expressed
here, but two stand out:
1. Research universities largely left the publication of
journals to others, and that has not worked out well.  We
now pay an escalating, collective Billions to rent the
right to read our own scholarship each year.
2. In contrast, in 1996 a group of universities invested their
own capital to create Internet2 as a university-owned
and operated high performance network. Internet2 did
not dig a trench for new fiber optic cable across the
nation nor did it create its own routers.  Rather, it
executed national contracts with leading commercial
providers of the day to create the first Abilene network
in 1998.  Those commercial relationships later evolved to
other firms as the network has since been renewed
three times and now boasts over 8.8 Terabits of capacity
at speeds of 100Gigbits per second speed supporting
over 500 members.
The lessons could not be more stark:  Universities
benefitted immensely when we came together to steer our
own path to scale by creating, owning, contracting,
governing, and then uniquely using shared infrastructure
to serve each university’s mission. Internet2 is our
network, and we have decision rights to set policies,
business models, terms, and manage costs to best serve
higher education.
Unizin is about learning from the past to create a member-
owned Internet2 of Digital Education; taking advantage of
scale to create shared infrastructure to enable innovation;
and giving faculty and students at universities tools to
share what they choose to share and to use what they
want to use to further education.
Launching Unizin
On 10 June 2014, the first four institutions announced the
creation of the Unizin Consortium. The news release and
the FAQ have many of the details so they are not repeated
here.  Unizin has been shaped by many evolving
conversations since 2012 to assess the best way to enable
long-term success.  Future blog posts here will cover some
of that territory as Unizin spins up, but in this first post we
touch on a few key strategies and choices.
1. Unizin is a cloud-scale services operator.  With
Internet2’s 100Gigabit national network to our campuses
and the favorable economics of digital shared services,
Unizin will contract for, integrate, and operate shared
services for its members.  It is not a software project for
download and local implementation.  It is a shift from
premises-based software implementations and local
integrations to a cloud-scale, consolidated service off
campus. It is not just LMS hosting as the market already
has such offerings.  Rather, Unizin is an evolving and
integrated set of services for Content, Software, and
Analytics steered by its members.  We envision a
professional services staff of around 20+ to integrate
and operate the Unizin service.
2. Unizin is common infrastructure to support the
missions of its university members.  It is not a public-
facing brand. It will not offer content, courses, or degrees
in its own name.  By pop culture comparison, Unizin is
the “Intel Inside” behind the great brands of its
members.  We sometimes use the comparison of Unizin
to establishing “common gauge rails” that enabled trains
to go farther than when each train company had
differing gauge rails.  As a common infrastructure
service, Unizin will make it easier for faculty to work
together across institutions when they choose to do so.
 Common digital learning infrastructure does not
differentiate the value of our institutions — it enhances
what each of us can do innovatively with it.
3. We believe this approach for common infrastructure
gives each institution and its faculty the best
prerogative to act in ways that serve Strategies of
Independence, Dependence, and/or
Interdependence for differing parts of their mission
and at differing times. See “Strategies for Coping with
Curves” in Speeding Up on Curves.  Universities are
amazing places with many differing needs among
schools, departments, and faculty. The opportunities,
needs, interests, and timing are not monolithic, and the
Unizin service enables each to make use of the
infrastructure as suits its current needs.
4. After much consideration, Instructure Canvas was
chosen to be one of the initial software components for
Unizin services.  Canvas has established a remarkable
record in its use of open IMS Global standards and
(mostly) open source software. Many faculty and
student groups have developed innovative add-ons
through the Canvas open APIs.  Through conversations
with the Instructure leadership and experiences on
many campuses, the founders chose to partner with
Instructure to give the Unizin service a very rapid
acceleration from day 1. A number of institutions had
recently pilot tested Canvas, and others have recently
moved with great success.
5. The Unizin consortium is designed to be extensible.
 Just as Internet2 began in its early days with a handful
of universities and grew to 34 founders and now has
over 251 universities/500 members, we see Unizin as
extensible over time.  There are many decisions and
trade-offs to be made in these early days, and those who
are investing the capital to form Unizin will be shaping
those decisions.  Like Internet2, Unizin will in later
years move to a Membership Dues model that provides
access to a well-managed shared service.  Its fees to its
members need to cover all its costs and good operations,
but they need not cost more and are not beholden to
anyone other than Unizin’s growing roster of members
over time.
In the 2012 The Marketecture of Community, we observed:
“Yet colleges and universities face great
institutional inertia in adapting to models of
intentional interdependence. The structure of U.S.
higher education has strongly enabled the habit of
“going it alone”—an independence enabled by a
plurality of funding sources. Although particular
campuses or institutions may feel constrained by
state or university rules for multi-campus
institutions, the U.S. system remains remarkable
for its highly distributed authority of institutional
governing boards, executive officers, deans, and
shared governance with faculty. Institutions have
long had the independent means to choose and
fund unique, solo contract solutions for their
distinct, geographically separated physical
campuses. The collective sum of these costs across
the [many colleges and universities] of higher
education—a sum that is quite large relative to its
modest benefit—looks increasingly peculiar in a
digitally connected world of open software and
cloud services.
The many virtues of institutional independence are
also its many vices. American higher education is a
vibrant marketplace of ideas, one that has
inarguably yielded numerous benefits over the last
fifty-plus years. Protecting and enabling that
marketplace for leading research and instruction
remains essential; whether higher education can or
should sustain such expensive heterogeneity in the
many essential services that enable research and
education is far more debatable. There is no
governance means, other than leadership, to
change this expensive trajectory. The responsibility
thus falls to leaders—and especially to IT leaders—
to inform, inﬂuence, engage, debate, and adapt their
institutions to an increasingly connected world.”
Unizin is a means to ensure that members of the Academy
shape the future in ways that best serve the noble mission
that is higher education. It gives universities and their
faculties a renewed, action-oriented, collective voice in
this vital conversation. It provides a means to reframe and
focus our attention on independence, dependence, and
intentional interdependence. It is a beginning. Over the
coming months and years, we look forward to working
with faculty, students, staff, foundations, other
universities, and all who treasure the power that
education, in its many forms, has to transform lives.
Brad Wheeler, Ph.D.
Next
© 2015 Unizin
720 Brazos Street  |  Suite 810  |  Austin, TX 78701
   
Founding co-chair, Unizin Consortium
Vice President for IT & CIO
Professor of Information Systems, Kelley School of
Business
Indiana University
James L. Hilton, Ph.D.
Founding co-chair, Unizin Consortium
Dean of Libraries and Vice Provost for Digital Education
and Innovation
Professor of Information, School of Information
University of Michigan
JUN 11, 2014


Why Unizin?

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