For classroom teachers and students using a variety of digital applications in their classes, each one requiring unique login information, this account management process can quickly become unwieldy. And it poses a serious drain on instructional time — both for maintaining students’ logins and also for the wearisome data-entry work by teachers to enter class rosters into each of their ed tech applications’ student data files.
For these reasons and more, a single sign-on (SSO) solution covering all of a school’s ed tech tools has long been a dream in K-12 education. Enter a group of SSO vendors working to tackle the problems created by the lack of interoperability among schools’ digital applications.
Clever is one of the industry leaders in this K-12 single login and rostering realm, and their company name is apropos. Because unlike most of their counterparts, Clever doesn’t charge schools a per-user fee. Instead, the company provides their single login and class-rostering product free to schools, while charging vendors to have their products included in Clever’s large array of supported applications.
Clever and its SSO competitors claim they can connect with any school’s student information system (SIS), and then act as the virtual “middle man” between the school’s SIS and the login solution’s supported applications. For teachers, this frees them from manually entering their class rosters. And here’s the big win: All of the school’s SSO supported applications allow users to then log in with just one set of credentials.
Many districts using these single sign-on solutions tools have a designated point-person who works with the SSO tool on behalf of schools, enabling the class-rostering and single login processes to occur in the background. So teachers are often unaware these tools are working on their behalf.
In addition to Clever, OneLogin, Classlink and Enboard, as well as Microsoft’s Active Directory, are a few of the other respected companies schools are employing for their SSO and class-rostering needs.
And coming at the class-rostering challenge from a complementary angle, the IMS Global Consortium is a nonprofit collaborative of vendors, institutions and government agencies working to advance the adoption of the IMS OneRoster standard within the ed tech community. Though only a rostering solution with no proprietary single login component, with OneRoster, IMS Global is filling a valuable niche.
Vendors must pay IMS Global for their applications to become IMS Global Learning Consortium Certified and then maintain an annual membership. But once certified, schools using these vendor applications are assured they’ll be able to work together with their districts’ other similarly certified ed tech tools. And to further support a more seamless exchange of data between their systems, some districts are now requiring an IMS Global certification for any new ed tech tools they purchase.
For schools, the single login issue remains, and no one solution has arrived to solve all of their SSO and class-roster needs. And with the growing use of ed tech tools in classrooms, each requiring a unique student and teacher login, the need is becoming more acute. But thanks to the efforts of many, this once formidable Tower of Babel is shrinking.
