Openness and Extending Blackboard Software Asbed Bedrossian Otto Khera USC

USC Blackboard has been at USC since In the Fall 2009 Semester USC will teach courses on Blackboard version ,600+ Courses 2,400+ Instructors 1,250+ TAs 29,000+ Students 2.5 TB of content, 140GB Oracle 10g database Originally worked with Database authentication, then LDAP authentication, and since January 2008, Shibboleth based Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication.

Current and Potential Benefits of Shibboleth Single Signon across applications – including potentially Web 2.0 / cloud apps that are part of the standard. Authentication (that you are you) and Authorization (that you may access specific resources) designed to meet the educational institutional needs. Data for assessment, accreditation, evaluation. Institutional equivalent of market open standards identity management (OpenID, Oauth, AuthD) and therefore NOT proprietary. Long-Term Prospect: Provides an identity management solution for the institution that can transition users (aka ‘lifelong learners’) to an individual identity management solution.

USC USC has been a member of the InCommonFederation(.org) since its early testbed days as InQueue. USC technologists have been involved with the Shibboleth project for many years. Some of our Shibboleth project friends may be online with us right now: Steven Carmody, IT Architect, Brown university, Internet2 Shibboleth project manager John Krienke, InCommonFederation Operations Manager USC has run Shibboleth for campus-wide SSO since USC was the earliest adopter of Shibboleth 2.0 and integrated it with Google USC in January 2008 and Blackboard in May USC’s SSO umbrella has 80+ Applications

What’s Important about SSO and LMS? Integrates different Learner-centric spaces into a seamless space Blackboard Google Apps Blogs (Movable Type) Wikis (Confluence) Campus Portal (uPortal) Video Streaming (mediabase) Library & Electronic Resources (EZ Proxy) Grading and Roster Systems Digital Measures Other LMS (Sakai, Moodle, etc) Removes the chore or multiple logins Consolidates the user’s identity and profile

Blackboard and Shibboleth The InCommonFederation has 114 Higher Ed and Government institutions, and 41 sponsored corporations as participants.InCommonFederation Blackboard is not a sponsored partner of the InCommon Federation. USC and many other institutions would like to see Blackboard join the InCommon Federation and officially support Shibboleth as an enterprise- wide Authentication and Authorization method for Blackboard.

WebCT and Shibboleth Blackboard has a WebCT manual describing how to integrate WebCT with campus SSO systems &rid=5686&dt= Title page in manual references a “Blackboard Learning System” Vista Enterprise and Blackboard Learning System, CE Enterprise Automatic Signon Protocol Vista (Release 4) and CE (Release 6) WebCT 8.x supports the same interface There's a bug in the PHP code included in the appendix Working version of code, plus additional info, will soon be posted to:

Blackboard Shib Resources Blackboard’s documentation on Shibboleth Integration. Visit the Shibboleth site Visit the Shibboleth Wiki at Internet2 Blackboard-specific page on the wiki: Special Interest Group (SIG) mailing list: InC-Blackboard Send to In the body of the say: sub inc-blackboard FirstName LastName Colleagues around the country! Join the community: Sign the sheet going around Join the Inc-Blackboard mailing list Tell Blackboard Inc. that you are interested in integrating your LMS with Shibboleth SSO, that there is business value in fully supporting Shibboleth as an AuthX method.

Integrating Blackboard with Shibboleth USC Eric Hattemer USC

Setting up Shibboleth Find the 500 page "Administrator Manual" for your release of Blackboard Go to the "Shibboleth Integration" Section and follow those instructions You need a Shibboleth IDP (not in the scope of this presentation) Generate a shibboleth*.xml according to your IDP specs We use Add a shibboleth account as admin to Blackboard before restarting

Shibboleth Configuration apache.conf that Blackboard recommends: AuthType shibboleth require affiliation ~ require user ~ ^.+$ [[[Second Column, USC uses: AuthType shibboleth ShibRequireSession Off Require shibboleth AuthType shibboleth ShibRequireSession On require valid-user shibboleth2.xml :

Timeouts and Sessions Heavily flawed in Blackboard with or without Shibboleth. Force Completion checkbox in tests is evil. shibboleth*.xml:

Logout By default, logging out of Blackboard doesn't work. Don't set Persistent Cookies in the Blackboard System Admin Panel.

Provisioning and Administration Anyone not in your Shibboleth database can't login to Blackboard There is no fail-to-RDBMS option Add-ons that don't know your IDP format can't login to Blackboard Much less of a problem if you protect only /webapps/login (mentioned earlier) Possible Solution: LDAP Admin Server Run an extra app server with a secret URL or IP whitelist Configure it for LDAP or RDBMS auth Use it for test accounts, building block registration, WebDAV, etc.

Q & A Asbed Bedrossian Director, Enterprise Applications and Operations Otto Khera Director, Center for Scholarly Technology Eric Hattemer Blackboard Administrator