InCommon Federation Discussions About Online Student Services

["Ann West" <>]

InCommon Student: Notes from 1/18/08
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Tom Black, Stanford
Nancy Krogh, Idaho
Bob Morgan, U Washington
Karen Schultz, Penn State
Renee Shuey, Penn State
Ann West, Educause/Internet2

Action Items
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- Ann to submit placeholder proposals to ATC and Educause Annual
Conference.

Notes
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- Updates/Announcements - All
--- Work with Vendors 

Tom and IT staff from Stanford met with National Student Clearing House
(NSC) and discussed/demo'ed Shibboleth. NSC agreed to set up a
Shibboleth service, which is scheduled to be finished in about a month.
(NSC has a new president, Richard/Rick Torres, who's on board with all
this and joining InCommon.) Stanford is recommending using fed idm to
access two NSC services: 

1) Student access for enrollment verification. Student will log in to
print letter and send to org needing verification. NSC will also be able
to send verification via email. Stanford has about 400-500 students per
terms using this feature. NSC expanded their institutional extract to
include institution id as a way of reducing the need for SSN for
authentication purposes.
 
2) Student tracker service for IR and HR admissions folks. Currently,
one fills out a form, including the desired credentials, and fax it to
NSC to get an account. To remove an account (because someone has left or
moved to another position), the institution must notify NSC. Password
changes are also sent in email. These processes aren't very secure when
you consider that these credentials will allow you to post institutional
degrees. Instead, Stanford hopes to leverage affiliation status in their
identity management system to increase the security and reduce the
manual processes for managing access.

Tom also mentioned that AAU Institutional Data Committee (IDC) ---formed
to evaluate university data collection in three areas: graduate
education, undergraduate education, and faculty activities--- will be
(or are) using the NSC student tracker service too. Currently, these
folks (presidents, provosts, IR officers from AAU institutions) must
submit the account-request form in the traditional way. Maybe we could
leverage the new NSC Shibboleth service for the AAU schools? We should
check the overlap of the AAU and InCommon:

AAU members: http://www.aau.edu/aau/members.html
InCommon participants:
http://www.incommonfederation.org/participants.cfm
[At first glance, it looks like about 24 institutions belong to both.]

Stanford will also be approaching CollegeNet regarding access to their
course evaluation services using federated identity. Tom also mentioned
possibly approaching Avow Systems about using Shibboleth to get
transcript status. He wistfully mentioned using fed idm when a student
or alumnus/a applies for law or medical school and request a transcript
to be delivered to the other school. Currently, the person must log into
Stanford's order system. If would be great to use fed idm and access
between the schools to streamline this, so folks would have a single
experience. 

Bob announced a proof of concept project with the Department of
Education to help them move to federated identity by participating in a
pilot for financial aid staff. The agency isn't accepting campus
federated credentials just yet, but is instead taking baby steps by
asking a limited set of pilot participants to get federated credentials
from Operational Research Consultants [ORC], one of their approved
credential providers, and use those to access a sponsored student
financial aid site called The eCampus-Based System
(https://cbfisap.ed.gov/ecb/CBSWebApp/). This site contains the Fiscal
Operations Report and Application to Participate (FISAP) for the three
Campus-Based programs: Federal Perkins Loan, Federal Supplemental
Educational Opportunity Grant (FSEOG), and Federal Work-Study (FWS). In
addition, it allows users to access Campus-Based account data and view
reports. The short-term pilot will occur this spring. Even though this
is a very small step and doesn't use campus federated credentials, it
demonstrates using federating technology in some form, which could lead
to better integration and accepting campus federated ids in the future.

--- PESC EA2 group
The group met on 1/18 in DC. Nancy will bring us up to date on the next
call.

- AACRAO IdM Workshop - Nancy/Ann
The workshop is scheduled to convene on Wednesday afternoon before the
ATC conference and finish up Thursday at noon. We hope to include
IT/Registrar pairs and develop a first cut at terminology, issues
outline, and IdM practices for AACRAO membership. 

Regarding vendor participation, chances are we would have some
involvement. Nancy and Ann will be bringing ideas and drafts to review
to this group to get your thoughts on the practice and program
developments. 

- Outreach this year?
The group agreed to submit proposals for the AACRAO Tech Conference and
Educause Annual Conference, both due in February. [AI] Ann will send in
placeholders that we can edit later. 

- Next Call will be Feb 15 at 3:00 pm Eastern.