InAcademia is a simple online service that allows online retailers to validate if a customer is a student or affiliated to an academic institution. It’s a low cost, easy to implement service providing fast, secure validation.
The InAcademia Service provides merchants with a quick, easy, reliable and secure way to verify academic affiliation (whether a user is a student, a member of staff or faculty), provided the student is registered with a participating eduGAIN Identity Provider.
InAcademia leverages the existing eduGAIN service acting as a proxy service to service providers that need only validate the academic affiliation of a user. InAcademia offers a lighter weight option for SPs, therefore, potential SPs can be offered an entry-level, low-maintenance alternative to joining the federation, increasing the number of services available to IdPs as a result.
It does this by using the user's credentials issued by their home institution. Deploying the InAcademia Service allows users to authenticate themselves in the same way that they would to access any access-controlled institutional service.
InAcademia leverages information from the higher education federation for identity, authentication and authorisation, eduGAIN, which provides an infrastructure used by thousands of institutions to enable their students and staff to authenticate with internal and external service providers. Validation can be configured to be requested in real time, and the information is up-to-date as the identity of the user has been verified (by the academic institution).
InAcademia does not form part of the supply chain in fulfilling products or services, but instead performs an auxiliary service that prevents the need for users to send scans or originals of their identity documents for verification. Student validation process using InAcademia will no longer rely on requesting and checking hard copies, scans or photographs of ID.
The process can be configured to trigger either during registration or checkout on a merchant's website - the merchant decides when - and the merchant is provided with an pseudonymous identifier to confirm the student’s status in real time, therefore, proving their entitlement.
When a validation request is initiated at a merchant’s website it triggers a validation request at the InAcademia.org service endpoint. The user is then asked by InAcademia.org to prove affiliation with the academic community by entering their institution-specific credentials. InAcademia evaluates whether the response matches the requested affiliation and sends back the result to the requesting merchant.
For further information, FAQs and technical details, please visit https://inacademia.org/