GOVERNMENT

The National Student Clearinghouse has made access to its popular web-based Student Self-Service application available through the InCommon Federation. As a result, any college or university that participates in InCommon can seamlessly provide their students with access to Student Self-Service by leveraging its existing campus identity management system. The Clearinghouse, a non-profit organization, provides educational reporting, verification, and research services to more than 3,300 colleges and universities.

InCommon is the U.S. trust federation in higher education operated by Internet2 that provides a privacy-preserving, secure, and scalable method for higher education institutions and their partners to offer access to protected online resources. InCommon participants use standards-based middleware software that allows collaborating organizations – in this case, a higher education institution and the Clearinghouse – to exchange a student’s relevant “attributes” (e.g., specific class enrollment or student status), rather than the student’s identity, to enable access to online resources. 

For the individual user, participation in InCommon provides the convenience of leveraging the university login credentials to access any number of participating resource providers, like the Clearinghouse. The Clearinghouse’s Student Self-Service application provides many useful options for students, including printing enrollment verification certificates, ordering transcripts, and viewing enrollment history and verifications provided by the Clearinghouse on behalf of the school, as well as other features.

The Clearinghouse originally developed a custom authentication mechanism for each higher education institution that was integrated into its existing authentication methods and portals. Stanford University approached the Clearinghouse about using InCommon’s standards-based approach to authentication. Stanford students can now use their university IDs and passwords to access Student Self-Service. When a student logs in, the university’s identity management system only releases relevant attributes about the student to the Clearinghouse to enable access to Student Self-Service. 

“The InCommon platform enabled us to deploy a single sign-on option for Student Self-Service on a proven framework, which could easily be adopted later by any other federation members,” said Doug Falk, chief technology officer at the Clearinghouse. 

The Clearinghouse worked with Stanford to pilot the use of InCommon for this application, and then implemented the solution at the University of Southern California and the University of Washington. The federated Student Self-Service application is now available to any InCommon participant that also participates in the Clearinghouse. For more information on Student Self-Service, visit www.studentclearinghouse.org/colleges/sss.