The University of Southern California is issuing a new USCard to first time and returning students this fall. The university has moved to proximity cards as a first step in transitioning away from magnetic stripe.

Biometric technology company, Zwipe, has partnered with London’s Rose Bruford College to overhaul the campus’ physical security needs by introducing a combination of biometric and contactless access control. The solution is a fingerprint activated contactless credential that works with both 125kHz and 13.56MHz infrastructures already in place on a campus.

In today’s short podcast hear from Zack Walker of Vision Database Systems on why a solution like PockeTracker is such a good fit for campus environments and his thoughts on Madison Area Technical College’s advanced deployment of the system. Then, hear from Madison College’s Doug Gerbitz, who has overseen the PockeTracker deployment across the college’s system of campuses, about the ways in which mobile ID verification is being utilized.

Bismarck, North Dakota’s Legacy High School is now the first school in the state to implement automated classroom attendance thanks to system provider, ScholarChip. ScholarChip’s smart ID card-based system that sees students tap in at the beginning of class to denote attendance, and enables administrators to more efficiently view class rosters in larger lecture settings.

Safran Identity & Security has recently completed a three-month pilot project that tested student use of wristband-based wearable payments at a university in Medellin, Colombia.

Barcodes will soon be a thing of the past at the University of Notre Dame, where beginning this summer the Irish1Card Office will start issuing new contactless cards. The new, multi-technology credentials will retain the magnetic stripe that Notre Dame has long utilized and will for the first time feature chip technology.

The key to navigating the contactless conundrum is to seek out information and ask the right questions. In a new, live webinar with Blackboard Transact the University of North Carolina at Charlotte will discuss their move to a contactless credential and how it’s changed the way the campus has approached the “one card” concept.