Research, and particularly the on-line collaborative research referred to as e-science, creates a new challenge for federated access management systems. In teaching, the authoritative statement whether an individual is entitled to access an on-line resource comes from their home organisation: are they a member of that course? are they covered by that institutional licence? Thus it is natural to provide a source of authorisation attributes alongside, or even as part of, the home organisation's authentication systems.

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.