Not everyone who has access to a service connected to SURFconext has an institutional account. For these users, SURFconext offers an Identity Provider: eduID.
eduID: 1 identity within education and research
Students increasingly want to study outside their own institution. For example, they have interests in subjects from different study programmes or they want to raise their profile on the labour market. Educational institutions also offer joint courses, the components of which are given to multiple institutions.
To facilitate this flexibility, students must be uniquely identifiable across institutions. In this way, different institutions can be sure that they are dealing with the same student and, for example, study results obtained can be exchanged. eduID makes this possible. Anyone directly and indirectly involved in education can use an eduID.
eduID and guest use within SURFconext
The plan is to ultimately introduce eduID for all students in education and research. It is not that far yet, but we are already going to use eduID for specific target groups. One of these are guest users of SURFconext. A guest user is a user who needs access to a service via SURFconext but does not have an account with one of the affiliated institutions.
To allow for guest users to login to a service connected to SURFconext, depending on the situation both the administrative contact of the SP and/or IdP have to give their consent for the use of guest access. Get in touch with support@surfconext.nl to request guest access.
By doing so, every eduID user can potentially login to your service, unless your service contains an authorisation mechanism.
A user manual for eduID can be found on our end user support Wiki.
Higher trust-levelÂ
The trust level of eduID accounts can be improved by linking the account to an institutional account. This way a service provider can be sure the use is an active student, or validate the name os the user. How a service can request a certain trust level can be found here.
API
The eduID identity provider has an API available for requesting extra information on a user.
eduID number
Several identifiers are available in eduID. Use the correct one in your service.