Read the full article by Andreas Froberg on the Univention Blog.
As a media center in Bremerhaven, we support around 40 schools, 1,700 teachers and 17,000 pupils in the use of IT and other media. When we began implementing our digitization strategy in early 2015, the introduction of a learning management solution was at the top of our list of priorities.
Introduction of the Online Learning Platform itslearning
Since the City of Bremen had successfully introduced the Norwegian cloud solution itslearning at that time, it was obvious for us to first take a look at what our colleagues from our sister city had already accomplished. In Bremen, Univention had connected itslearning to UCS via a specially developed connector, which has already been used for many years to centrally manage the digital identities of pupils and teachers in Bremen. Since the connection of itslearning to the management system of UCS in Bremen worked very easily and other IT services were also managed there with UCS, we decided to follow a similar path and to build on the solution from Bremen. At the beginning of 2016, we chose UCS Domain as our identity and access management solution for the schools in Bremerhaven.
Following the successful establishment of a UCS domain, we focused on connecting itslearning to UCS and decided that the synchronization of users from the Bremerhaven domain should run in the same itslearning entity as that of the Bremen domain, so that pupils and teachers can now use the same learning management solution across their federal state. This creates a synergy effect and also helps to keep bureaucracy to a minimum when teachers or pupils are transferred within the federal state of Bremen.
The itslearning UCS Connector ensures that all user data only needs to be entered once, since it securely transmits all changes to user objects and groups made in UCS to itslearning via the HTTPS protocol. At the same time, users are authenticated to itslearning directly vis-à-vis the UCS system, which means that users can log on to itslearning using their usual passwords and user names. The data is encrypted and forwarded to the UCS directory service LDAP. This service gives feedback as to whether the user has the permission to access the directory. The passwords themselves are not transmitted to itslearning or any other service, but are stored in the UCS system in compliance with data protection regulations.
For users to have a good overview of and easy access to the services connected to their environment, we have set up a web portal for Bremerhaven with UCS, which allows users to access all services and itslearning online. It can be reached at elearning.bremerhaven.de.
Andreas Froberg is head of the Bremerhaven Media Centre at the Bremerhaven City Council.
