RedShelf Accessibility-Focused eReader to Further Unizin’s Mission of Digital Transformation at Scale
Austin, TX, and Chicago, IL, — November 2, 2021 — Unizin, a member-based nonprofit consortium of 13 leading universities providing solutions around data, analytics, and digital content, and RedShelf, a leader in the delivery of digital content, today announced that Unizin will add RedShelf’s eReader to its digital learning ecosystem for the 2022 fall academic term. The addition of RedShelf as the content delivery partner underscores Unizin’s commitment to accessibility and furthers its mission to enable digital transformation at scale.
As student preference continues to shift from print to digital textbooks, the eReader has become a fundamental extension of the content, enabling students to effectively interact with the material for the express purpose of learning. The RedShelf eReader, recently named Publishing Software of the Year by EdTech Breakthrough, is a cloud-based platform that can be accessed online or offline from any device and features a range of built-in study and assessment tools. The addition of this award-winning eReader to the Unizin partner community provides an accessibility-focused, user-friendly solution for member institutions, and will also deepen the base of learner data to support academic research through the Unizin Data Platform (UDP).
“Partnering with RedShelf allows us to immediately upgrade the student experience with an eReader solution that keeps accessibility (a11y)—especially for those who don’t self-identify as having a disability—in primary focus;” said Cathy O’Bryan, CEO of Unizin. “The RedShelf solution was built with the understanding that accessibility is a fundamental human right and that accessibility should, therefore, be front and center in the software development process. It’s an approach that resonated with us, and a key reason we’ve forged this partnership.”
“We are honored to have been selected by Unizin and we could not be more excited to partner with them to make our software available to the nearly 900,000 students across their member institutions,” said Greg Fenton, Founder and CEO, RedShelf. “We make significant investments in our eReader platform to stay on the leading edge of what’s possible—a solution that will help Unizin address challenges associated with data and analytics around digital content.”
Through strategic collaborations between partners like RedShelf and its core institutional members, the Unizin consortium develops products, services and communities that drive the present and future states of digital education--endeavors that no single institution could achieve cost-effectively on its own. Further, this consortium model supports the development of solutions, services, and partnerships that empower its member schools to scale the use of data, analytics, and other digital content in a unified, standards-based technology ecosystem.
About Unizin
Unizin provides institutions with technology solutions and partnerships that enable them to scale their use of data, analytics, digital content and learning tools to improve outcomes. Unizin is membership-based and governed by its Founding Member institutions as a nonprofit 501(c)(3). It is currently composed of 13 institutions and nearly 900k learners, making it one of the largest educational organizations in the country.