Excellence Gateway
This case study was produced by JISC RSC (Regional Support Centres) East Midlands on behalf of the Excellence Gateway.
Sector relevance: Further education colleges (including specialist colleges)
Keywords: Improving teaching and learning, improving responsiveness, improving institutional effectiveness, management of resources, managed learning environment, management of ICT infrastructure
Following the withdrawal of JISC funding for ATHENS, the access and identity management system in July 2008, many FE colleges have been investigating alternative ways of accessing online resources.
The colleges in this case study have both successfully implemented Federated Access Management using Shibboleth technology to enable students to access various electronic resources by merely signing into their respective College networks.
The case study looks at how these colleges, which were early adopters of the technology, got to that position and gives readers some things to watch out for if contemplating going through the same experience.
Both are successful FE Colleges in the East Midlands region achieving high marks in OFSTED inspections.
Loughborough College is a leading provider of education and training in North Leicestershire with over 12,000 full and part-time students. A thriving and successful further education college, it has an annual turnover in excess of £19m and employs over 900 staff working hard to provide a high quality learning experience for every student.
West Nottinghamshire College is a large general further education (FE) college primarily serving the districts of Mansfield and Ashfield and the M1 corridor linking Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. It provides courses in all sector areas, with qualification ranges from pre-entry level to higher education, and has approximately 19,000 learners enrolled and a staff of over 1,000.
Teaching and learning today increasingly involves the use of electronic resources. The ability for students and tutors to be able to access these resources easily whilst maintaining the security of the resources is of vital importance.
'Access Management' is the term used to describe the process of permitting access to protected online information, usually in the context of web pages or web-based applications. It describes both the means by which an online information resource decides whether to allow access to a protected area, and also the administrative process of allowing access for approved individuals. (Source: JISC)
The withdrawal of JISC funding for Athens in July 2008 saw the end of this as a free service and meant that many FE colleges and other institutions that relied on this service needed to make a decision as to how they would continue to access resources online.
Using IP addresses as a validator was a potential choice for colleges and is actually used by West Nottinghamshire College for on-campus usage. But this method means that resources can only be accessed on-site as the IP address cannot be validated off-campus, a definite drawback - particularly for any distance learners.
As JISC was now funding the move to Federated Access Management (FAM) as a means of access to online resources, the colleges decided to investigate this further.
FAM builds a trust relationship between Identity Providers, in this case the Colleges, and Service Providers of the resources. It devolves the responsibility for authentication to a user's home institution and establishes authorisation through the secure exchange of information (known as attributes) between the two parties, using Shibboleth technology.
There were three basic choices available for the Colleges to adopt this approach:
The last option of paying someone else for a subscription on an annual basis was deemed undesirable on a long-term basis. As once any initial set-up costs had been paid for, there were no further charges, other than costs incurred for hardware and software maintenance for using FAM due to the fact that it is open-source.
Therefore both Loughborough College and West Nottinghamshire College decided to go down the path of the option of implementing FAM within their respective organisations. West Nottinghamshire College wanted to use it for off-campus access. Meanwhile Loughborough College took the decision to use it for both on and off campus access.
Both colleges applied to take part in projects that had been put in place to provide early-adopter funding over the transition period, so took the second option of the ones outlined above.
Loughborough College had a successful bid to take part in the IAMS project accepted in December 2007. Through this they had support provided to them from a commercial provider. This was delivered by the IT services team at Kidderminster College, who used a Linux-based solution.
West Nottinghamshire College had similar support but this time through a CV builder project run by Nottingham Trent University. In their case the solution would be based on a Windows 2003 platform.
For more details on the technical installation of FAM go to the UK Federated Access Management website.
To ensure the successful implementation of FAM, one of the important parts of the process was to get the relevant staff working together. This process impacted upon the Learning Resources teams (LRC staff), the IT teams and the Senior Management at the colleges.
Image 1: Internal co-operation within learner providers is essential to successful implementation of FAM
A wide range of resources and help was available for both colleges to utilise:
Those who adopted the technology early on unsuprisingly found they hit some snags with the technical part of the process.
At West Nottinghamshire College one of their most important technical issues was with SSL certificates. The College had never worked with these before, so initially tracking down who could request them was the first hurdle. In a test/training environment the user generates their own certificate and it is just a certificate, however a real certificate has to have a second part - a “chaining” certificate. The chaining certificate wasn't dealt with in the training, so initially the College didn't know what to do with it and got it wrong.
At Loughborough College one of the electronic resources, MINTEL, was used to authenticate through the servers by allowing a 15-second period in which to do so. However, one of the College servers was 30 seconds out on its time setting so the process kept on crashing.
Clare Holden, Learning Resources Manager at Loughborough College explains that having the technical expertise in-house is “absolutely critical”, adding that “we wouldn't have been able to implement it without this, even with the outside support we received.”
One thing to watch out for is that the ATHENS administrator automatically becomes the FAM administrator. This often means that the Learning Resources Manager is normally the Federated Access Management Administrator, but they may struggle to complete the fairly technical forms required to provide the information.
Image 2: Learners at Loughborough College now have single sign-on to a variety of electronic resources via their college's learning platform
Following the end of free access to ATHENS in July 2008 and a hard summer of work, both Colleges had their system set-up in time for the start of the 2008/09 academic year in September. Since the implementation of FAM, both colleges have set up an area (or course) on their Learning Platforms (or Virtual Learning Environments) to facilitate access to their online resources.
This means that the resources can be managed more easily by Learning Resources staff, and for the students it means that they only have to go to one fixed place as a starting point for accessing the online resources.
At Loughborough College, they run a single learning platform using Moodle, and it is the only part of the whole system that is password-protected, so that only the bona fide students can access the resources.
The same process is in place at West Nottinghamshire College. They have 17 different instances of their learning platform within the organisation, so one of the bonuses of implementing FAM is that as well as being able to access external resources with a single sign-on, students and staff will eventually be able to access resources across the different instances where their permissions will allow them.
Image 3: Learners at West Nottinghamshire College now have access to electronic resources both internally and externally through their College Moodle
The benefits of using the Shibboleth technology to access via FAM are:
Top tips
Staff from both of the Colleges have been able to share tips between themselves over the period of implementing FAM. They've now kindly highlighted some of the most important points for you, along with some of their insider information to save you time and effort.
Heather Peake, VLE Development Co-ordinator, WNC says:
“It is really important to have your documentation in place right from the off."
"Design a log-on page for where the students sign into FAM. It needs to have your organisation's identity (logo, colours, style) otherwise students get confused."
Sue Sproston, Learning Resources Manager, WNC says:
“I found it useful to have my own spreadsheet of which service providers were using FAM as it was constantly changing."
"Make sure you have a thorough check of all your library resources, website, staff intranet, induction manuals, basically anywhere that might contain references to the old ATHENS system, as you will need to update them all, and you often wont have long in which to do this."
Clare Holden, Learning Resources Manager, LC says:
“All the service providers we've dealt with have had really good in-house expertise on setting-up FAM for their resources."
"Get some friendly users to test the system before it goes live. For example I could access the learning platform from home OK, but when others tried they couldn't - so we needed to solve some permissions problems."
"In September 2008, when we launched FAM for the first time, we had a problem with teaching staff lifting the URLs from within the Moodle course and putting it directly into their resources. This meant that as the instructions and the URLs changed for the service provider, this information was lost and the student wasn't able to access the resources - so communication with teaching staff and students is paramount."
In summary, Clare Holden at Loughborough College thinks that:
“Having gone through the pain of implementing Federated Access Management, I'd say it was worth it.”
Sue Sproston at West Nottinghamshire College agrees:
“Our main challenge was to make access as clear as possible for the students and I think we've succeeded.”
Simplification of the authentication process has also proven to lead to increased use of subscribed services. According to Lynne Spicer, Learning Resources Team Leader at Loughborough College:
“From on the ground in the Learning Resources Centre, it is clear to see that the resources are being used more by the students and they are being used in a better way.”
One of the things that both colleges are looking into in the future is to have a new WAYFless link for each resource, which will mean users will be able to skip choosing which institution they are from on the UK Access Management Federation's website so that the process becomes easier. To find out more about this visit the JISC RSC Northwest website.
Because FAM is still new, resource providers are continuing to develop access arrangements and terminology. It is a good idea to check the remote access pathway for each resource regularly as the names of links may change.
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Disclaimer: The Regional Support Centres (RSC) and the Learning and Skills Improvement Service (LSIS) support the development of educational e-learning. We may refer to specific products, processes or services. Such references are examples and are not endorsements or recommendations and should not be used for product endorsement purposes.
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Clicked on the rating by accident and its set to 1 - cant seem to change it. Nor can i change it here in teh comment page - why????!!!! Stupid system!!!!!. Anyway. Found the article very useful especially as I am trying to get my mind around the principles of FAM and most documentation assumes you understand the concept. I would rate the article at a 4 - and recommend it as a first step to FAM.
John Ewens, South East
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