Oregon State University

Oregon State University utilized Cirrus social login solutions for continuing education students to streamline single sign-on access to Canvas and Drupal.

Oregon State University (OSU) was switching learning management systems (LMS) from Blackboard to Canvas. At the time, non-credit continuing and professional education students required three different accounts to access three systems:  1) LMS, 2) a Registration system and 3) Content Management System developed in Drupal.

These three local accounts had a history of not having sufficient management and OSU identified this as an area for improvement during the LMS transition. At the time of the implementation, OSU did not have an existing centralized guest account system. While building a system was considered, both time constraints and potential one time and ongoing expenses made the build solution unattractive.

As OSU was evaluating solutions, they discovered the current process for the existing Blackboard solution relied on self-asserted identities with no vetting. Building a service to replicate this functionality would provide little value over using the identities provided by Google, Facebook, Yahoo, or other Internet providers.

OSU needed to find a better way to manage access for continuing and professional students when they moved to the new Canvas LMS.

The OSU Identity Management Team brought together stakeholders from across the organization to determine needs and review the Cirrus Identity social login solution. This provided a forum to both build buy-in, and gave the OSU Security team the opportunity to evaluate the solution. The Security team determined the Cirrus social login solution would be an improvement over the legacy account management process implemented for Blackboard.

The Cirrus Identity Gateway  product was easily configured in the OSU environment using the SAML protocol.  Enabling continuing and professional students to use a known social login to access all the systems they needed dramatically improved the user experience! The OSU Identity and Access Management team was able to configure the integrations for the social providers using the web based Cirrus Identity Administrator Console and could centrally manage the attributes released.

The Cirrus Identity cloud-hosted SaaS solution did not require installation. This allowed the Gateway to be deployed on the tight timeline required for the switch to Canvas.

After objectively evaluating different solution options, OSU chose the Cirrus Identity Gateway as the best solution.