Implementing single sign-on for adult students
Submitted By: Sean Abajian
Division of Adult & Career Education (DACE), LAUSD
Type of Practice: Program Development / Curriculum / Classroom
Program Area(s): ABE / ASE, ESL / EL Civics / Citizenship, CTE / Workforce Prep / Pre-apprenticeship, Adults with Disabilities
Region: Los Angeles Basin
Consortia Involved: Los Angeles Regional Adult Education Consortium
Program Overview
Successful effort to bring single sign-on access to LAUSD's 70,000 Division of Adult & Career Education (DACE) adult students
The Challenge
Adult learners in Los Angeles Unified School District's Division of Adult & Career Education (DACE) had not had school email, Google Suite or Office 365 accounts. School emails would make it possible to scale up creation of learning management system (LMS) accounts for all 70,000 DACE students, thereby increasing LMS access and usage. Having Google for Education accounts would enable students to easily communicate and collaborate on digital classroom projects. With the academic Office 365 accounts, students could gain free access to Microsoft Office software such as Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Single sign-on (SSO) provides the solution to all of these challenges by allowing users to access more than one application by signing in once, instead of having to log in to use each application. While SSO is something commonplace for K12 and community college students, it hasn't been available to DACE adult students.
The Solution
In spring 2017, a proposal to set up SSO for adult students was presented to LAUSD's DACE leadership by Sean Abajian, DACE Central Office Instructional Technology Teacher Advisor. Executive Director Joseph Stark, Administrator Rosario Galvan and Coordinator Laura Chardiet approved the plan and provided the necessary funding. Abajian then began working in partnership with various teams in the LAUSD IT Department and by early September 2018 it was ready. “Rather than just have students activate their SSO accounts, we would like them to demonstrate their ability to use some of the resources that are now available to them,” Rosario Galvan, DACE Administrator, explained.
The Outcome
With this in mind, Abajian then launched the four-week "gamified" SSO Treasure Hunt Challenge with a team of school site Instructional Technology Advisors. As a result, 10,044 DACE students completed all four objectives of the challenge in which students not only activated their SSO accounts, but also opened their new email account to send an email, used a Schoology code to join an learning management system course, and logged in to take a Google form survey. To encourage engagement, Chromebook carts were announced as prizes and awarded to the school with the highest number of participants (Abram Friedman Occupational Center), and also to the school with the highest percentage of student body participation (LA Technology Center).
The Data
The way the data was collected for the SSO Treasure Hunt Challenge is as follows: Instructional Technology Teacher Advisors (ITTAs) provided support to teachers explaining how their students could access the PIN numbers to activate their SSO accounts. Students then sent an email to an email account set up for their specific school allowing the possibility of quantifying emails by checking the inbox. The LMS course provided a tally for each student who joined with a code. Finally, a separate Google form was set up for each of the 11 schools and the spreadsheets were checked for a tally of participants. Daily reports were provided during the four-week rollout to school principals and the ITTA team so the data could drive participation.