The University of San Diego has decided to launch ParkMobile, a mobile parking payment and reservation app, on its campus to enable students and campus visitors to easily pay for parking from their mobile device. The ParkMobile app is now available for over 2,000 parking spaces on the USD campus.

Let’s face it, there’s not much happening on the back of a student ID card. Mag stripes and barcodes aside, in most cases the reverse side features little more than a paragraph of tiny black-and-white legal jargon and perhaps the odd financial network logos. But in 2016, we looked at what a campus can do with the back of the ID card to turn it into a valuable resource for students.

Blackboard’s Mobile Credential has been in the wild since October and is now fully available to students on four campuses, with two more in tow. Early reports from the launch are showing strong adoption rates, suggesting that the use of Apple devices for campus transactions isn’t just an exciting solution for students, but potentially a strategic differentiator for universities.

Auburn University is mandating two-factor authentication for access to student accounts. The changeover will begin with class registration and email access on Feb. 25, when the University will start to require students to use DUO, a two-factor authentication service. The university implemented DUO as a means to keep students’ identities safe and better protect their personal information.

The University of Utah is now revisiting its access control policies for campus residence halls and updating its guest policies following the death of student on campus last October. In total, the security overhaul has plans to consider upwards of 30 campus safety recommendations.

It’s often taken for granted just how much a modern campus card system enables its users to do. Payments, access control, attendance, event ticketing, and more are all routinely rolled into a single credential. Residential students at Maryland’s McDaniel College will soon benefit from another of those use cases, with McDaniel 1Cards now being used for dorm access, replacing the long-used brass key. 

A new viral marketing campaign from popular point-of-sale systems provider, Square, Inc., is paying Indiana University students for their participation in a social media driven promotion. The promo requests that students download Square’s Cash App, snap a photo of their student ID card and send that photo to a specified phone number in exchange for a small cash reward.