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Your students are admitted, registered, receive finanacial financial assistance, take examinations, receive grades, graduate, receive a diploma, order transcripts and have a viable academic life and history.  However, these educational experiences and and institutional services are delivered remotely - these students have never been to campus and proximity to brick and mortar is not an expectation nor a program requirement. But, who are these people and how do you know they are who they say they are?

The institutional response to this question of assuring student identity is not new.  However, the ubiquity of network(s), easy access to computers and smart appliances and compliance with privacy statues has heightned our sensitivity to the issue.  For example, section 495 of the HEOA (2008) states that insitutions institutions offering distance or correspondence education must have processes that establish that the student who registers for a course or program is the same student that parrticipates participates and completes it!  What processes and practices are used and/or should be used to establish our student's identity remotely? 

The need to identify remote identity practices has been raised in several venues.  Recently, AACRAO sponsored a webinar entitled "Recruiting, Admitting and Providing Services Remotely: Establishing Identity, Distributing Credentials and Identity Management" in response to a question regarding remote identity practices and whether they were deemed secure, reasonable and compliant.  The feedback from the webinar led to the belief that the need for a published set of remote identity practices was not avialableavailable, but  truly needed.

What is the Goal of This Survey

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The following technology-related terms are used in this survey:

UserID iis UserId (or userid) is an account a user name or login ID (NetID).  Can be name-based or not and may or may not be permanent/persistent. For some systems, the userid may also be an email address.

Credential is an identifier (such as a UserIDNetIDUserid/NetID) or identifying token (such as digital certificate) coupled with a "shared secret". usually a password or pass phrase issued by a system to a person., that has been mapped authoritatively to an individual. The identity of the person may or may not be known to the system  when the identifier and the shared secret are issued.

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1. Department of the person(s)  completing the survey. (If you have a team working on filling out the survey, please check all the departments that apply):
   1. Admissions
   2. Registrar
   3. Distance Education
   4. Information Technology
   5. Other ______________________
2. Institution information
   1. Name of Institution (This will not be published in the survey results but will be used to correlate answers from the same school.)
   2. What is the size of the distance education student population?
   3. How many students go through the prospect process at one time?
   4. If your institution offers both traditional and distance education degrees, are your student credentials (username/password) maintained and administered:
      1. Together
      2. Separately
      3. Other____________________________
   5. If your institution offers both traditional and distance degrees, are the admissions and registration functions:
      1. Combined/consolidated into one unit
      2. Separate
      3. Other___________________________
   6. Please provide your email address if you agree to be contacted regardubg regarding questions about your survey (if any):
      ____________________________

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