InCommon Federation Discussions About Online Student Services

[Ann West <>]

All,

Our next InCommon Student call is Friday June 27 at 3:00 pm Easter. 
Bridge information is:
877-944-2300
99208#

Agenda
-----------
- Updates
AACRAO IdM Workshop
Vendor discussions

- Review of Issues Paper (to follow this email)

- Discussion of EDUCAUSE accepted proposal - "Opportunities and 
Efficiencies: Supporting Student Services with Federated Identity," 
EDUCAUSE 2008 in Orlando, Florida, on Friday, October 31, 2008 from 9:30 
AM to 10:20 AM See information below.

- Your item here

Hope you can join the call,

Ann



EDUCAUSE Session Description
----------------------------------------------

Here is a copy of what you submitted for your records:

Presentation Title:
Opportunities and Efficiencies: Supporting Student Services with Federated
Identity

Format:
Panel Discussion

Topic Area 1:
Administrative Solutions and Business Process Improvement

Topic Area 2:
Leadership

Topic Area 3:
Identity Management

Presentation Abstract:
Emerging trends point to using Federated Identity to address challenging
issues in supporting access to off-campus services. Where should this
technology fit in a registrar’s service strategy? Registrar and IT
panelists will discuss new partnerships and initiatives in this area and
describe exciting opportunities for sourcing and supporting student
services.

Presentation Content 1. Statement of the problem or issue:
There are a number of reasons why thinking outside of the box for hosting
the variety of student services makes sense, but right now off-campus
hosting is difficult to accomplish because of the access management
issues. If those were mitigated, what could we do?

There are a number of things we could enable within or among our campuses
as well that are difficult currently. For instance, sharing of electronic
services across our international campuses and partners with the main
location in the US, Closer to home, this might entail streamlining
services offered between main campus and the medical school, typically a
very separate organization.

In addition, classic security problems exist with setting up (and
maintaining) staff and student accounts with key service and data
partners, organizations that are critical to the student services
functions. How can we get these processes in line with good security
practices?

Presentation Content 2. Description of activity, project, or solution:
Sponsored in part by AACRAO, EDUCAUSE, and Internet2, a group of IT and
Registrar campus representatives have been meeting for about a year to
work on access management problems for off-campus or inter-campus student
services. Areas of interest have included: outsourcing anonymous student
course evaluations; working with large data partners such as National
Student Clearinghouse to streamline and better secure access to their
services; participating in a small pilot with a government agency to
demonstrate federated identity in the financial aid realm; developing
tools for communicating to Registrars about federated identity.

The group is also participating in the development of an AACRAO white
paper for campus IdM practices for student services, a quick description
of which will be included in the presentation as a key resource.


Presentation Content 3. Outcome:
This session will offer examples of how two campuses are leveraging
federated identity in the student services area. Panelists will include
Registrar and IT representatives and provide a discussion of their
business challenge and how federated identity is addressing the access
management portion. Also discussed will be resources available to those
interested in doing similar things.

Presentation Content 4. Importance or relevance to other institutions:
Offering 24X7 services and integrating them for ease of use is challenging
at best. Federated Identity allows a campus to have hosted services appear
as if they were on campus while maintaining the control over personally
identifiable information release and increasing security. Federated
identity is useful not only in the student space, but also in research and
teaching learning as a critical cyberinfrastructure component to
facilitate inter-organizational collaboration. And as with all
infrastructures, the value to the institution increases as the number of
applications and uses increases.

However, understanding the concepts and how they could be used will
provide attendees with solutions for challenges they will probably have in
the future. And to implement federated identity requires an initial
identity management system, which takes time to deploy.

This presentation will present a quick introduction to federated identity,
discuss the current work and pilots that the group is working on and offer
information about getting started for IT and Registrars.


Suggested Audience:
CIOs, registrars, campus executives, business analysts, data stewards,
technical management and implementation staff, and student services and
security staff.