Safe authentication with SURFconext

At imedu, we highly value privacy, and try to collect as little personal data as possible. That's why we use anonymous PIN codes instead of a 'log in' by default, for students and participants who visit your virtual sessions.

What is SURFconext?

SURFconext is a central authentication service for higher education in The Netherlands, offered by SURF. This service allows employees and students of member institutions to securely log into imedu, identifying exactly what data the institution and user shares with imedu. More information can be found at: https://www.surf.nl/en/surfconext-global-access-with-1-set-of-credentials

How to activate SURFconext for imedu?

imedu is already a registered service provider within the SURFconext environment, which means that any institution can activate imedu. For the integration to actually work, the following two things are required:

1) The institution must have a SURFconext connection and activate imedu within it

2) The institution must have at least one active imedu account with a LARGE subscription.

Once both of these are in place, we can link your imedu environment to SURFconext. To do this, we ask you to provide the domain of your organization (or the 'schac_home_organization' claim)

Logging into imedu with SURFconext

Once you have activated the SURFconext integration, you can use it in two ways:

1) To log in on your personal account.

Instead of choosing your email and password, you can also log in with SURFconext. Of course, your institution account must have the same email address as your imedu account.

2) To log in on a student (team) account.

If students want to create or set up rooms themselves, they can work under an internal imedu account. Here, no personal information is stored in the account, and multiple students can log into this account. To make this possible we use SURF teams ( https://wiki.surfnet.nl/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=10132152) to classify students into teams. Each team has a unique ID (team URN) that we associate with an internal imedu account, once we receive this information from the SURFconext login.


A SURFconext integration is quickly arranged, and depending on the internal steps, we can often activate it in a day. Want to know more? Then contact our support at hello@imedu.io