UNIZIN-A Cloud Framework/Collaboration for Teaching and Learning

Bruce Maas, University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States of America, [email protected] Amin Qazi, Unizin, United States of America, [email protected]

Keywords Transformation of Teaching and Learning

ABSTRACT The Unizin Consortium (www.unizin.org) is universities coming together in a strategic way to exert greater control and influence over the digital learning landscape. It enables each institution, its 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, or even MOOCs if desired. Unizin supports the differing missions and strategies of universities. Unizin Services are cloud-based infrastructure based on open technology standards. It will evolve to support content systems that empower faculty with full control over their owned content — store it or share it — and an analytics service to enable research to improve learning. As a university-owned service for universities, all of this will evolve within the longstanding values of the Academy. Unizin is membership- based and is being launched by a group of founding investing universities . It is governed as a not-for-profit service operator with a CEO and board of directors from its members as an Unincorporated Association at Internet2. Unizin’s founding members include Colorado State University, , the , the , Oregon State University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Penn State University, , The , and the and it is extensible to other investing institutions. In our presentation, we will explain the reasons behind Unizin, bring you up to date on the most recent developments, and talk about how interested universities can either join, or be sponsored. We will cover such things as the cost of joining and remaining a member, and the benefits that will accrue to members.