InCommon Federation Discussions About Online Student Services

[Ann West <>]

All,

After today's call and since it was in my head, I drafted a second Access 
Control story, this one involving grad admissions. See what you think.

Have a great weekend, folks!
Ann
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Betsy is a senior at Penn State and wants to apply to North Carolina State 
and Georgetown for graduate school. Starting on the NCSU graduate site, she 
notices the CommIT Collaborative logo and the blurb that it will help 
streamline her admissions process to Graduate School. Intrigued, she surfs to 
the CommIT site and clicks on "Apply to Graduate School."

She is asked to log in and chooses Penn State as a credential provider and 
logs into her home institution. Betsy is then presented with information 
about how CommIT sets up relationships between her undergraduate and 
potential graduate schools, so that she doesn't have to worry about 
requesting releases for all the information needed by NCSU and 
Georgetown---they will do that behind the scenes once she sets up the 
relationships here and requests it in the respective graduate applications. 
These relationships are only good for 6 months and expire after that time, 
unless Betsy sets it up for longer. She leaves the slider set at 6 months, 
but doesn't want PennState sending information about her past that time. She 
should be in SOME program in 6 months!

To get going, Betsy sees a list of CommIT participants and drags Penn State 
into the "information provider" box and Georgetown and NCSU into the 
"information recipient" box and clicks ok. The screen is updated with New 
Information Relationships and lists the two she just set up.

Next she surfs to NCSU's graduate admissions site and clicks on login and 
chooses PennState as her home institution. Because she's already 
authenticated (we're all federated right?), PennState passes her name to NCSU 
and NCSU displays "Welcome to NSCU, Betsy. What would you like to do?" 
Thinking for a moment, Betsy clicks on "Apply to Graduate School." A window 
pops up and asks "Have you defined Information Relationships with the CommIT 
Collaborative?" and Betsy clicks on yes. "Please wait while we are checking 
on your access management preferences." Several seconds later, the window is 
updated with "Access preferences found. Would you like us to download your 
PennState 1) demographic information 2) academic transcript 3) link to 
academic portfolio, 4) letters of recommendation, or 5) all of the above ?" 
Betsy clicks on all of the above. Several minutes later, her screen is 
refreshed with the NCSU Graduate Application filled in except for external 
contributions and other items not in her transcript. She also notices that 
the transcript and letters have been download and portfolio link provided.

WOW, is that cool! Saves me a ton of work.