Unizin Consortium Grows Again with Addition of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Published April 8, 2026

(April 8, 2026) - The Unizin consortium has welcomed the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, one of the original 37 public land-grant institutions, to its growing roster of members. The decision to join Unizin comes as student enrollment at the University has topped 60,000 for the first time in the school’s 158-year history. 

Now in its 11th year, the Unizin consortium continues to advocate for and advance the process of integrating and applying learning data to support student success.  As digital learning tools and platforms proliferate within classrooms and across campuses, students, faculty and higher-ed administrators across Unizin’s 16 member campuses are benefitting from data-derived learning insights, while also sharing tools, resources and knowledge across institutions.

“The pace of technology adoption and evolution continues to accelerate at the University of Illinois and in our everyday lives,” said Mairéad Martin, Vice Provost for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.  “Joining Unizin opens the door to new opportunities for cross-collaboration with other leading institutions and gives us access to tools and resources that can help bolster the teaching and learning initiatives already underway.”

Unizin’s common data model aligns bits of data emanating from disparate student information (SIS) and learning management systems (LMS) deployed within its member schools, while the Unizin Data Platform (UDP) warehouses data and makes it accessible for research, analysis and to power student, faculty and administrative-facing applications.  Unizin’s consortial approach enables member institutions to bring their existing analytics, business intelligence and reporting systems to the UDP while also learning from, collaborating with, and utilizing knowledge and tools developed elsewhere in the network.

“The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign uses student data to support student success in a number of ways. In addition to more traditional measures such as graduation and retention rates, student data informs our campus’ policies and practices,” said Kathy Martinsen, Associate Provost for Educational Programs and Success Initiatives. “Our participation in Unizin and access to the tools and knowledge shared throughout the consortium will help support signature initiatives like Student Success @ Illinois, as well as accelerate new ideas and approaches to applying student data across our campus.”

“As the consortium continues to grow, the benefits to all our members expand as well,” said Bart Pursel, CEO of Unizin.  “Working with the University of Illinois team to apply what we already know and have developed to their unique environment will ultimately grow our knowledge base and give rise to new ways to approach the common challenges facing all our members. “

With the addition of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Unizin membership now encompasses 16 leading academic institutions, serving more than 825,000 students. Seven member-led committees drive collaboration within the consortium focused on key areas and initiatives, including: digital content affordability, learning analytics, data analysis, learning tools, teaching & learning, application development and accessibility.  

The Unizin development team works with member institutions to integrate the UDP into their data environment and develop the processes and tools to utilize the UDP for member-led research and development, as well as enable cross-collaboration between member institutions.  The average UDP deployed at a Unizin member institution contains 22.8 terabytes of data, with some of Unizin’s larger institutions scaling to over 80TB of data, and receiving millions of clickstream events per day from 10 unique edTech platforms.