unizin.txt

pt 1. tell you more about unizen, team project, motivating you for the role
- 20p company
- 6p engineering team
  - downtown austin
  - serves educational tech market
    - digital transformation cuase / academic mission

    - digital content (digital versions of textbooks)
    - unizen provides solutions that helps universities profide OERs
      - shopping experience for faculty, etc

    - two products:
      - unizen order tools (white labeled marketplace experience)
      - unizen engage - delivers the content in a student experience

      - unizen data platform (CGP) - solves probs in edu space to transform data from the tools into analytics that feed into student success
        - GCP and Unizin are entering a partnership to create solutions for academia
        - problem 1 - in any course, students are using 10-15 different software platforms
          - data from these tools is going to come in some data schema, some kind of dimensional schema - two kinds of data
            - real time event stream (johnny started a course)
            - context data (more descriptive data)

      - dimensional data (context data) - flat files, batch ETLs (airflow)
        - Unizin common data model
          - large data dictionary
          - loading schema for SIS and for LMS
            - some fields are required (PK and FKs), some are optional (i.e. verteran status)
        - postgres to enforce relational constraints
      - event stream data
        - webservice that can be posted to
        - simple auth mechanism, schema validation
          - event then gets parsed or analyzed and qualified for ETL processing
          - these events get put onto pub/sub (SQS) topics
          - flask applications listen to these applications and process this data
          - eventually this lands on an event store (BigQuery)
          - hydrates a data lake

      - RStudio and Jupyter to get the community (their customers?) working with the data
        - learning analytics
        - code can be migrated between different instances and the code is transferrable
        - LMS (learning management system) gives a lot of data, and the SIS (student information system)

      - SPAs in react
      - backend with django
      - deployed in kubernetes
      - CI/CD with ansible and helm and argo?
      - deployed into AWS
    
pt 2. hear from you about what you're looking for


Questions to ask and responses:

What are these strategic challenges? Commercial providers wouldn't have their interests well-served
  - Community of practicioners, annual summit in April that's Unizin summit of universities for members and non-members
    - First is data interoperability standards - IMF Global, membership org, mix of edu orgs and vendor community
    - Unizin has shepherded a behavioral standard (called caliper) that is more in line with institutional stds for research, as well as a common data model
  - Even though standards exist, it can be challenging to get the vendor community to adopt them
    - Vendor agreements (they work with commercial publishers) - pearson, mcgraw hill, mcmillan
      - Unizin aggregates demand (faculty who wants stuff)
  - UDP as core enterprise infra for higher ed institutions
    - All of them have DW, but the problems solved by those solutions are not the same types of problems that need to be solved in the learning space
    - The paradigm we've taken for UDP is much more scalable and modern and opinionated system designed to address the needs of learning analytics practicioners
  - Budgets come from IT budgets of the universities (because the CIOs generally vouch for them)
    - This is a pain point because univs need cross functional teams to manage their data

How much autonomy does Unizin have to make desicions for themselves?
  - "We are independent" - not sure what this means (they receive public investment instead of capital investment)
  - They report to the board their strategic progress
  - None of the institutions they serve are in Austin btw - they didn't want them to be too close 

What does the partnership look like with GCP?
  - They are in the forging process right now
  - Working with 'google for education' as well as 'google cloud'
  - Selling GCP to the public sector and higher ed
  - GCP views Unizin as a tech partner who brings together a solution that brings value to a data laeke
    - Predicting 4 and 6y gradiuation rates
    - Retention rates
    - Summer melt