Last spring a group of university leaders announced a bold, new project intended to help colleges gain more control of their online course platforms, as they increasingly turned to providers like Coursera or edX. A year later some observers are wondering what the group has actually accomplished, and where the consortium is headed. In June 2014, amid growing concern that outside companies were exerting too much influence on the branding and shaping of universities’ online course offerings, four institutions — Colorado State University, Indiana University, the University of Florida, and the University of Michigan — teamed up to form a member-owned consortium they called Unizin. The goal was to help negotiate contracts jointly to secure better terms, to offer analytics services about students, and to help provide a framework so that campuses could get software products to work together more seamlessly.

June 5, 2015 ・ From Chronicle of Higher Education