Shibboleth Developers

["Alistair Young" <>]

I agree, it would be easy enough just to batch import. My view is probably
coloured by the work we're doing on "zero administration" for
institutional accounts. Our students don't have to have accounts created,
they're all done "on the fly". This means tutors don't have the overhead
of managing accounts and everyone has just one password, which they change
in only one place - the SIS.
What I'm probably trying to say, in a roundabout way, is shibb/saml in
conjunction with auto account creation/auto SIS synchronisation to
facilitate importing virtual students.
If we can smooth the way for inter-institutional data transfers (such as
the SIS scenario) then perhaps it would make it that bit easier to
implement shibb/saml frameworks in eLearning.
As Tom said, it's fine to bung a few links up to shared resources but when
money is involved, then the heavyweights start making noises, such as the
SIS!
Now, anyone any good at the politics of SIS....?
Alistair


-- 
Alistair Young
Senior Software Engineer
UHI@Sabhal
 Mòr Ostaig
Isle of Skye
Scotland

>> I'm not really following the virtual student scenario. I don't know if
>> SIS
>> users are fully qualified, most probably not and I doubt if any VLEs are
>> directly linked to an SIS.
>
> What does that matter? If you batch load students from a local domain into
> a
> VLE, just qualify them with the proper "local" qualifier. I don't see why
> you'd need to special case anything once you're operating solely within
> the
> VLE. Just use qualified user identifiers (ideally opaque ones) for
> everybody, and map from the authentication credential as needed.
>
> -- Scott
>
>