Students like services that provide discounts or other benefits. To allow services to provide discounts it must be possible to verify if a person is student and staff in a trustworthy way. The current mechanisms for validating affiliation either involve human checking of affiliation, for example by showing a student card. The physical validation does not work for digital services. InAcademia provides a solution to vaildate students in a simple way.
InAcademia offers a near 100% viable student validation. With InAcademia online merchants can now offer a student discount without being spoofed by non-students trying illicitly to apply for a discount. Webshops can effectively tap into the student market without any administrative hassle.
The validation sequence is activated by a “I m a student” button on the website. Customers who click on that button will be redirected to InAcademia to validate their student status. After successful validation the service provider receives an acknowledgement.
InAcademia works with the higher education federation for identity, authentication and authorisation (AAI). The technical infrastructure of InAcademia takes care of the interaction with the identity providers at the various education institutes across Europe.
Online retailers pay a small fee per student validation for the InAcademia service.