"By outsourcing digital education services -- by partnering with a massive open online course provider, for example -- Hilton and Wheeler argue that universities "shift control and economic power to entities outside of academia that develop and own technologies and services at scale." As a result, "long held faculty and student rights regarding control of intellectual property and privacy might no longer be decided in the academy.""
"To be top 10, you have got to be global," Elias Eldayrie, UF's vice president and CIO for Information Technologies, recently told the board of trustees. "You need to connect."
Creating Unizin with Indiana University, the University of Michigan and Colorado State University was a year in the making, Eldayrie said.
At one time higher ed wanted community-built software because of the $0 price tag; now many universities are paying somebody else to keep open source projects moving forward.