InCommon Student Notes - April 16, 2010
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Attendees
Brendan Bellina, University of Southern California
Keith Hazelton, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Nancy Krogh, University of Idaho
Mark McConahay, Indiana University
Molly McGill, WICHE
Lori McNabb, University of Texas System/WCET
Rodney Petersen, EDUCAUSE
Mark Scheible, North Carolina State University
Ann West, Internet2
Dean Woodbeck, Internet2 (scribe)
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Molly McGill and Lori McNabb joined the call to provide information on what the WCET program at WICHE is doing in terms of remote identity proofing.
Molly is the associate director at WICHE, an organization that works in distance education, e-learning and online learning, providing professional development and sponsoring working committees.
Lori chairs the WCET initiative (which is part of WICHE). Professionally, she oversees student and faculty services for the University of Texas system's teleservices. WCET is a working committee focusing on academic integrity and student verification. The group is developing best practices related to different methods of authentication.
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Survey Background
Mark McConahay provided an overview of the genesis of the proposed survey, "Challenges with Remote Student Populations," as well as the work the collaboration group started on mapping levels of assurance to services provided at various stages of the student lifecycle.
Lori discussed the WCET work in assuring that the person taking a course is the one doing the work and receiving the credit. They have focused on four areas: 1) credentialing, 2) proctoring, 3) use of authentication technologies, and 4) account for other practices as they develop. They have divided into three groups to work on best practices for topics 1, 2, and 3.
The WCET group is also comparing and contrasting authentication technologies and working on a decision-making tool to help with the selection of a process and/or a technology.
There was a discussion about Axiom, which develops software that enables challenge questions based on credit reports. While some people find this creepy - they don't like to see questions coming from their credit reports - the Axiom system can verify that users are who they say they are in various settings. Axiom is the big player in this space, but they aren't really geared to higher ed, particularly with their pricing model.
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Next Steps
There was a discussion about whether to continue with the survey or whether time might be better spent on identifying best practices.
The group will review the best practices document from WCET (Lori has provided this to Ann, who will send to the group), and consider how the work on credentialing might fit (as well as thinking about areas in which collaboration might be possible).
AI - Everyone will review the best practices and pose questions/thoughts via email. The next meeting in two weeks will be used to talk about more specific next steps.
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NEXT MEETING - Friday, April 30 - 3 p.m. EDT / 2 p.m. CDT / 1 p.m. MDT / Noon PDT