Both Michigan and Florida are prominent members of the MOOC platform Coursera, and while none of the current universities are members of the edX consortium, Unizen does plan on expanding to include several more like-minded universities. In Wednesday’s call, however, Elias Eldayrie, chief information officer at the University of Florida, said Unizin will not be in the business of offering courses.
“You will never take a course from Unizin,” Eldayrie said.
The founding universities will each make a million dollar investment in the consortium over the next three years. Other universities hoping to join Unizin should also be willing to make an investment, the officials said Wednesday. But a university will not have to become a member in order for its students to benefit from the project, Hilton said.
“The point at the really broad level is to push for interoperability so no matter where the students are, if those institutions pay attention to those standards, then the world gets better for everybody,” he said.
That would require an awareness campaign about those standards, and Unizin — like Internet2 for that matter — is a “hard concept for people to get their heads around,” Hilton admitted.
“It’s about creating common gauge rails,” he said. “Its about leveraging open standards and making sure content and data can pull between tools and systems rather than being locked up inside a single tool.”
That train analogy made a few appearances in Wednesday’s call. Brad Wheeler, chief information officer at Indiana University and likely the driving force behind the consortium’s creation, equated the current digital education landscape to what would have happened if train companies had all used different track gauges.
If there had not been a standard for the spacing between rails, then all trains couldn’t travel along the same tracks. It’s the same with digital education tools, Wheeler said.
“There is a lot of capability out there already today, but where do these things go over time?” he said. “Do we want to repeat the last 15 years where each institution is an island and making one-off decisions about this technology or that technology? [Unizin] is shifting the game from one-off decisions to acting together.”
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