AlcoholEdu

Integration type

Interactive

Customer

Student Services, incoming freshmen

Status

Maintaining

Description

Incoming freshmen can use ICON as a portal to access the AlcoholEdu course.

AlcoholEdu is a third-party vendor providing an online alcohol awareness course for college students. In a pilot program, all incoming freshmen for the 2006-07 school year were required to take the course.

Traditionally, AlcoholEdu requires students to fill out a registration form containing identifying information (name, email address, university ID number, etc). Because the course was required of incoming freshmen, on penalty of blocked registration, the project participants wanted to handle identification in a way that admitted no errors that could cause problems for students.

In this integration, an ICON course site was set up with all incoming freshmen enrolled. Students accessed the course within ICON (after authenticating via HawkID, of course). Students then clicked a link that connected them to AlcoholEdu. The process:

verified the student's ICON session
gathered the students name, email address, and university ID
passed the identifying info to AlcoholEdu, so that an account could be created (if one did not already exist)
forwarded the student to the external AlcoholEdu site, already logged in and ready to go

The process utilized a beta API provided by the AlcoholEdu vendor. All indications are that the program was amazingly successful during the first pilot semester, with a better than 99% completion rate. The program ran similarly during Fall 2007 and Fall 2008, when responsibility for the program transferred to Student Health Services.

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