A recent discussion got me thinking about what might be the right number of passwords. There are plenty of references that still say you should have a different password for every service, and breaches such as Adobe’s last year show why. If you use the same password on two different websites and one of those gets compromised, either by phishing or loss and cracking of a password file, then both accounts are put at risk.
I've had several conversations this week that related to what's commonly referred to as "level of assurance": how confident we can be that an account or other information about an on-line user actually relates to the person currently sitting at the keyboard. Governments may be concerned with multiple forms of documentary proof but I suspect that for most common uses in the education sector that may be over-complicating things.