Identity and Access Management and the Technology Outlook for UK Tertiary Education 2011-2016 (Part Two)

Recently, the NMC Horizon project published its report, Technology Outlook for UK Tertiary Education 2011-2016: An NMC Horizon Report Regional Analysis, produced in collaboration with CETIS and UKOLN. The last ten years have seen massive changes in the ways in which UK tertiary education institutions handle authentication, identity, and access controls, and I would like to take a look at each of the technologies it mentions and discuss whether their adoption will force or encourage further change.


The report groups technologies into three groups of four, the first group being those which are imminent (time to adoption one year or less), then those which are likely to be adopted in two to three years, and finally those which the contributors to the report expect to be adopted in four to five years. I will devote a single post to each group of four. This is post two of the three; go to post one, post three.


Game Based Learning


This is the first of the second set of technologies, due for adoption in two or three years. As far as access is concerned, there are two points to make. First, since in the tertiary education context, games used for learning will presumably be connected to courses, the access policies will basically match those for existing VLE services. Indeed, it is likely that if adoption is widespread, many institutions will wish to embed games in their VLE, if they use one. So there should be existing processes which determine who has access to a game (at several levels: to play, to access scoring and other records, and to manage it), and there should be existing procedures to implement whatever is required for access for those people who should be permitted it - adding identifiers to an access control list from an student information system database, for example.

The second point is that how access controls are enforced will depend on the game environment and its implementation. The links given in the report are not explicit about how their games are implemented, though one of them is clearly using Flash, and another is embedded into social networking and will presumably also use Flash. Other candidates for game development will include HTML5. It seems likely to me that most of these games will be browser and/or app based, and so will have authentication methods which are of these types, which could utilise existing methods such as Web SSO technology for authentication.

As with the technologies in the first part of the report, there will be privacy requirements which will need to be insisted on in the development of games. In many online games, users are interested in league tables for players; will these be shareable? If games have a collaborative element, how will the information sharing required for this work - and how will it affect assessment? What about the sharing of hints and tips - another activity common in gaming communities?

Learning Analytics


Essentially, this describes the analysis of the large quantities of data generated by student activity on the Internet - including activity not necessarily considered to be part of a course, such as social network activity. Stated like this, as it is in the report, it is immediately clear that there are implications for student privacy in this work. Employees already complain about similar activities (on a smaller scale) by their employer, such as the monitoring of Facebook use (one of the issues on the US-based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse Workplace Privacy worksheet, to pick just one example of a discussion of this practice; one particular service offering to do this for employers is discussed on ReadWriteWeb).

There are other issues, too. As one of the links from the report says, "Both data mining and the use of analytics applications introduce a number of legal and ethical considerations, including privacy, security, and ownership". It then goes on to suggest that these concerns will decrease over time, due to the introduction of new tools and "as institutions are forced to cope with greater financial constraints that will make the careful targeting of available resources increasingly important". I am not sure I agree, particularly outside the US - privacy has long been much more important to legislators in Europe. It will be interesting to see how this develops in the UK, and how students over the next few years feel about it. And learning is not the only field in which analytics of this type could be used: how about research assessment in 2016? Or your annual appraisal in 2015?

New Scholarship


This topic is really about the use of non-traditional means of publishing for research (blogging, podcasting, etc.) basically, rather than (or, more usefully, alongside) peer reviewed academic journals. This is really an extension of traditional methods of exchanging ideas within the academic community (but consuming less coffee). It is actually a change which has been going on for quite a while: when I was a graduate student in the early 1990s, worldwide communication by email for special interest groups was just beginning to be embraced by members of the department.

The interest for IAM is not in the authentication side of things; shared access blogs, authenticated comments, and so on are all commonplace. There are two issues that immediately come to mind Firstly, the question of how controlled such new media are, and how an institution can protect its reputation. The LSE, where I worked until recently, was embroiled in controversy over just this issue earlier in 2011. Of course, universities have been embarrassed by the utterances of their staff for many years; people  don't need a blog in order to say controversial things. But it is becoming harder to even keep track of the places where an institution needs to check to find out what those who are affiliated to it are saying in public. After all, a director doesn't want to discover a budding problem only when a tabloid reporter contacts them.

The second issue is one of authenticity. How is it possible to be sure that a blogger is really the person you think he or she is? Linking published journal articles to individuals is hard enough, without having to manage every staff member's personal blog or blogs - hence the ongoing Names project. This is an issue which is only going to become more difficult.

Semantic Applications


This technology is about the intelligent use of material from online sources, usually the open Internet but possibly including protected content, to make connections between items of data automatically, without intervention from human researchers. (This is also, and perhaps better, known as Linked Data.) This may not seem to have any identity component whatsoever, but in fact there are two issues: data provenance (ownership and authenticity), as discussed above, and allowing access for the intelligent applications to closed content. The second of these is a technical issue, and should be readily soluble in the timescale suggested for the adoption of semantic technology, two or three years.

It's fairly clear that many of the promoters of Linked Data are not keen on the use of closed content, but there is no particular reason why (parts of) the data processed need to be accessible to everybody on the Internet; obviously the ability to use it for widespread  use will be compromised, but that may well be considered a small price to pay (see also the entry on the topic in the Structured Dynamics Linked Data FAQ).