Page 25 - Campus Technology, October 2017

IT INFRASTRUCTURE & SYSTEMS
Unizin Consortium
Project: Unizin
Founded in 2014 by Colorado State University, Indiana University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Florida, Unizin is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to improving the learning experience with technology. Member institutions can access a growing suite of solutions — evolving and integrated tools, resources and services that support the basic principles of open standards and interoperability — in three broad categories: content production and collaboration; the learning environment/
course delivery; and data analytics and data management. The consortium has now grown to a dozen institutional or university system members.
Project lead: Amin Qazi, chief executive officer
“Unizin contracts for, develops, inte- grates and operates evolving cloud-scale services for its members’ digital teach- ing and learning environments. As data is increasingly the oxygen that fuels the academy, we are putting in the hands of
Qazi our institutions the data and infrastruc- ture that’s ready to use for each univer-
sity’s particular needs as its goals evolve over time.” — Amin Qazi, Unizin
 Tech lineup: Canvas by Instructure, Pressbooks
Johnson County Community College
Project: Migrating to a Sustainable Technology Infrastructure
At Johnson County Community College (KS), a migration of e-mail, website and ERP systems from on-premise to hosted services has resulted in a true culture shift, new skills for IT staff, new support processes and changes in workloads. IT has gained continuity in the replacement cycle, fortified infrastructure and built deeper partnerships with vendors.
Johnson County Community College’s project team (left to right): Sandra Warner, Del Lovitt and Matthew Holmes
Project leads: Matthew Holmes, director, network and data center operations, and Del Lovitt, director, enterprise system support
“We were in a pattern of going through a request for proposal process every time we needed a piece of technology and it was hampering our ability to build an infrastructure that was interoperable. Basically whatever the vendors had on fire sale at the time is the piece we would get .... We went from that to a situation where the campus has the latest and greatest and is expecting a mobile-first experience. That was a big turning point.”
— Sandra Warner, Johnson County Community College  Tech lineup: Amazon, Ellucian, Microsoft4
Unizin’s e-text initiative is working to provide more affordable course content to students.
Courtesy of Unizin
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | October 2017
Courtesy of Johnson County Community College