Platform overview

Data infrastructure for a learning analytics ecosystem

Today more than ever, higher education institutions must leverage data generated by learning technologies to inform their academic mission.

While higher education has made meaningful gains using data for learning analytics, advising, predictive modeling, and other student success practices, there remain systemic challenges to using learning data at scale.

Chief among them is the challenge of integrating data from a fragmented data ecosystem and purposefully preparing it for use across the enterprise. The Unizin Data Platform (UDP) is a solution to that critical, strategic problem.

The Unizin Data Platform (UDP) is a standards-first integration, normalization, and warehousing solution for data generated by teaching tools. The UDP complements an institution’s existing data and analytics tools. For many institutions, the UDP is a key part of a comprehensive institutional learning data strategy.

Higher education institutions use the UDP to leverage learning data from the Learning Management System (LMS), Student Information System (SIS), and catalog of LTI tools used at their institution in a holistic, consistent, and normalized way.

Key features

• Data interfaces that support industry-leading data interoperability standards to load contextual and behavioral data from teaching and learning tools

• Support for plug n’ play, custom, and fully-managed data integrations

• Data normalization, assuring that data from any source is translated into a common data dictionary

• Automated surrogate key management, enabling learning data sourced from different learning tools to be associated together, creating a single representation of learning data from an institution’s learning tool ecosystem

• Data interfaces that support data consumption by the institution through cloud-native data services

• A secure, scalable cloud-native data architecture to enable institutions to own their learning data and serve a wide variety of stakeholders

How Institutions benefit

• Institutions choose the Unizin Data Platform because it enables them to own and control their ecosystem of learning data in support of their academic mission.

• The UDP can function as a key piece of an institution’s overall learning data strategy.

• The UDP enables an institution to leverage industry-grade data interoperability standards, avoiding the costs of proprietary data standards maintained by commercial vendors or institutions themselves.

• The UDP outbound data services enable institutions to serve various stakeholders within their own institution and, also, control what data commercial providers receive to support their products.

• Unizin offers the UDP as a fully-managed PaaS and works with institutions to implement and configure their UDP instances.

• Alternatively, institutions may purchase a UDP license from the Google Cloud Marketplace and operate the UDP on their own Google Cloud Platform account.