Many organisations offer students and staff special discounts or deals – student railcards, offers on everything from clothes to concert tickets, free or discounted software and services – as long as they can prove that they are students. But how do you provide these offers online? Requiring students to scan and email student cards takes effort and risks students sharing much more information than is necessary, and then those scans have to be manually checked and verified, making offering deals time consuming and costly.
Wouldn’t it be perfect to give discounts to students and be sure that the user is actually a student? Wouldn’t it be great to enable federations and IdPs to access a community of service providers who offer services of interest to students but who are not typically interested in the trust requirements of full federation?
Now we have a solution to help bring identity providers, students and suppliers together. In collaboration with national research and educational networks (NRENs) GÉANT introduces InAcademia, a service for validating a user’s affiliation with an academic institution. This lightweight process allows small commercial organisations to validate the status of a student or academic without having to join and Identity Federation directly.
Read all about it on the website of InAcademia.
Submitted by Mark Bevers
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