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Great. So I am Adam Wenchel and I am with EverFi.
At EverFi we teach students critical life skills such as financial literary, substance
abuse, civic engagement, and digital citizenship. Universal authentication is the idea that
teachers and students should be able to access all of their technology resources with one
username and one password. This is an important subject for us here at EverFi and here is
the reason. 14:08. 14 minutes and 8 seconds. That is the amount time from when the first
student rolls into a classroom, accesses our platform to the time his last classmate has
finished the registration process and is engaged in learning and we have very good usability.
So this says, you know, in a fifty-minute class period, a third of it is being lost
to account creation.
So we started talking to our friends Mozilla about, you know, putting together a project
on universal authentication. Mozilla, everyone knows them for their Firefox browser, but
they have actually done a lot of great work on a range of subjects promoting openness
and interoperability and healthy digital ecosystem. One of their projects is called Persona and
it is a way to tie together different identity management systems to enable universal authentication.
The next person we brought in was, we wanted it to make sure this project is rooted in
the real world, so we called our good friends out in Anson County and Dr. Greg Firn and
his team who are here today. We said “Hey Greg, we are putting together this cool project
with Mozilla and it is for the White House, we would love to get you guys involved, and
it is on universal authentication.”
Before I could even explain why I thought this was important and thought it was a good
idea, he said “Adam, this is a great idea. We would love to get involved. Every seventh
grader in Anson County needs to remember 8 different usernames and passwords to access
all the educational tools we use. And each of them have different password strength requirements
and usernames and it is a big mess. And it only gets worse every year as more technology
is adopted into the classroom.”
So we put together this system using Persona technology and what it does is that it allows
someone to log onto the EverFi courses and platform using an account that is tied to
their existing Anson County email address so that we are not recreating anything or
adding a new account, we are tying it to the existing infrastructure
using Mozilla’s Persona technology. And it does this all in a way that respects all
the great regulation around student privacy and protects our kids and students and also
aligns with great initiatives like the National Strategy on Trust and Identity in Cyberspace.
Universal authentication is useful not just because it reduces this friction I discussed
up front but because it enables a whole lot of things like longitudinal studies and really
creating a ditch rich data landscape that you heard Ross talked about it earlier. Being
able to make sure that you are tracking a student along as they progress from school
to school and even across state lines is made possible if universal authentication is done
the right way. So there is a lot of cool things it enables.
In our project alone, one of the things we are real high on is digital badges, online
awards to incentive and encourage and recognize student academic achievement. Mozilla also
has done quite a bit of work on this and you will hear from them later on that. And so
because we can now say with certainly who we are talking to, Mozilla has a platform
called openbadges.org that allows teachers to go and create arbitrary badges on anything
from perfect attendance to getting the highest grade on a test. We are able to share those
badges in a secure way so that a teacher, rather than having to log onto 8 different
systems to see all the student’s learning achievement, can log into one place, go to
Open Badges, and see their EverFi badges sitting next to their perfect attendance badges and
makes life a lot easier and reduces that friction we talked about it earlier.
So I have talked about why we at EverFi think universal authentication is important, why
Mozilla thinks it is important, why Anson County is really committed to it, but I want
to put an even ever sharper point on it.
12 minutes and 40 seconds. At EverFi we are pretty big data nerds. We look every second
a student or teacher is on our platform at what they are doing just so we can make our
own tools better and understand they way they are learning. 12 minutes and 40 seconds is
the amount of time a teacher spends during a 50-minute period resetting password, looking
up forgotten username, and dealing with a whole category of issues around account management.
That is almost a quarter of a class period that a teacher is not teaching, they are spending
time being system administrators, and this problem is greatly reduced with universal
authentication. So when we talk about universal authentication, we are really talking about
is removing the awkwardness and friction that is inherent. As great as all this education
technology is, we have seen tremendous amount of innovation the last few years, there is
a lot of awkwardness that we need to get rid of and we also need to unlock a lot of value
in the process.
So, why is universal authentication important? Simply put, it is putting our teachers and
students in the best position to succeed.
Thank you.