Campus ID News
Card, mobile credential, payment and security
FEATURED
PARTNERS
apple watch student id 1

Apple teases student ID card for access and payments on Watch, iPhone

Blackboard Transact campus clients lead the charge

Chris Corum   ||   Jun 04, 2018  ||   ,

The rumor mill always starts turning ahead of an Apple event, and it was no different in the lead in to the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) this week. Among the rumors again this year, was the anticipated opening up of the NFC chip’s capabilities to enable additional services to use the short-range communication protocol.

Anyone who has followed Apple’s work with NFC will have heard this before, so while it’s nice to hear Apple discuss NFC, we were naturally skeptical of what would be on show at WWDC. Still, we watched in anticipation that this year’s Developer Conference would provide some long awaited news regarding NFC and the student ID card. We got a glimpse.

The student ID card officially made its appearance on the Apple stage in the watchOS portion of the keynote. Apple Technology VP, Kevin Lynch, announced that this coming fall the student ID card will soon be available to add to iPhone and Apple Watch for access and payments on campus. The integration will enable students to add their campus card to the Wallet app on iPhone or Apple Watch to support access to places like dorms or libraries, as well as support payments at locations across the campus.

Lynch went on to reveal that the initiative will launch this fall. According to Apple documentation, "the program launches with Duke, the University of Alabama and the University of Oklahoma this fall. Johns Hopkins University, Santa Clara University and Temple University will bring the capability by the end of the year."

Apple student ID card announcement 2018

 

While the prospect of iPhones and Apple Watches being used as credentials on college campuses is certainly exciting, there is also a trend in the early adopter campuses. Though Blackboard wasn’t mentioned by name in the keynote, each of the flagship campuses listed on stage is a Blackboard Transact client and the company has now confirmed its role alongside Apple in bringing this technology to the campus card industry.

When reached, Blackboard indicated additional details will follow, but responded with the following:

“We’re excited to confirm that we’re working with Apple to help bring the ability to add student ID cards to Apple Wallet. Beginning this fall, students, faculty and staff will have the opportunity to seamlessly access facilities and make payments at locations on and around campus with the iPhone and Apple Watch. This capability offers students and the broader campus community heightened security and extraordinary convenience, taking advantage of compatible terminal/reader devices from Blackboard.”

The long and winding road

Apple’s brief acknowledgement of student ID card being used with its flagship hardware is a bit of a watershed moment for not only Blackboard, but for the campus card industry as a whole.

Blackboard has been pushing campuses to NFC since it shipped its first NFC-capable readers in 2010. Since then hundreds of campuses have deployed tens of thousands of the company’s NFC readers for access control, attended and unattended payments and privilege control. To date, the credential they have used has been the NFC compliant contactless card, but both the company and its campus clients have always looked to the day when they could also use the mobile phone as a student ID credential.

The challenge until now has been that only Android phones have offered support for this feature via the handset’s embedded NFC chip. Apple added NFC to the iPhone 6 in 2014, but restricted its use to only to its own, proprietary Apple Pay service and then later to limited tag reading functions. Until this announcement, using NFC on the iPhone in “card emulation” mode – that is, to act like an ID card in campus card systems – was prohibited.

As we in the campus card market understand better than perhaps any other market, multi- application is crucial. Modern students demand that their campus credentials support the full range of transactions across the campus, from door access to vending and privilege tracking to dining hall entry and payments. Today’s keynote was an important step in the right direction.

Immediately following the WWDC event, Apple added a review of the major announcements online. Under a header "Student ID Cards. Major Campus Access" Apple describes the upcoming feature: "Access the dorm, gym, library, campus events, you name it. Just add your student ID card to Wallet. Then hold your Apple Watch near the reader. You can also pay for snacks, laundry, and dinners around campus with just your watch.”

The universities highlighted on stage at WWDC have been hard at work with the technology for some time now. They, along with countless other peer institutions across the country deployed NFC-capable readers believing this day would come. And while additional details will emerge in the coming weeks and months detailing how this service will work in the wild, today’s announcement offers the first validation of this strategy.

Related Posts

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter

RECENT ARTICLES

USF ID card back
Mar 28, 24 /

Caveat emptor when adding contact numbers to campus cards

The back of University of South Florida’s ID card provides several phone numbers for students in crisis or seeking safety services. Many campus cards contain similar resources, but what happens when this information changes. How do you deal with incorrect contact info for essential services? The USF card prominently lists contact numbers for the victim […]
High school bathroom

Bathroom breaks tracked by campus ID and mobile app

At California’s Fresno High, a new app is authorizing and monitoring trips to the bathroom in an effort to increase students’ time in class and decrease gathering in halls and bathrooms. Of course, this has not gone over well with students. Raising your hand and asking the teacher if you can go to the bathroom […]
Atrium Ozzi container

Atrium clients track check-out and return of reusable containers at OZZI kiosks

The push to reduce or even eliminate single-use containers from campus dining is now easier for Atrium clients. Thanks to a seamless integration between Atrium and the OZZI reusable container program, the processes for both students and dining services is streamlined. Atrium clients have been using OZZI for years, but the two systems were independent. […]
CIDN logo reversed
The only publication dedicated to the use of campus cards, mobile credentials, identity and security technology in the education market. CampusIDNews – formerly CR80News – has served more than 6,500 subscribers for more than two decades.
Twitter

Feb. 1 webinar explores how mobile ordering enhanced campus life, increased sales at UVA and Central Washington @Grubhub @CBORD

Join Jeff Koziol and Robert Gaulden from @AllegionUS as we explore how mobile credentials and proptech are changing on- and off-campus housing.

Load More...
Contact
CampusIDNews is published by AVISIAN Publishing
315 E. Georgia St.
Tallahassee, FL 32301
www.AVISIAN.com[email protected]
Use our contact form to submit tips, corrections, or questions to our team.
©2024 CampusIDNews. All rights reserved.