Written by António Coucelo, Manager of the Digital Identity and Security Service at FCT, in the digital services unit FCCN
September has its own sound. After weeks of deserted corridors, the crowds return, along with queues at services and schedules that no one understands at first. But there's another start to the year that happens in parallel and never appears in photographs: the moment when thousands of people activate their institutional account, connect their mobile phones to the Wi-Fi network, and enter the e-learning platform for the first time, where they will spend the semester. When that start goes well, nobody notices it.
Perhaps it's worth establishing one idea from the outset: the distance between students and teachers isn't measured in meters, it's measured in friction. It's measured in the number of steps required to ask a question, submit an assignment, receive a correction, or find the article mentioned in class. Each obstacle, each additional password, each additional form, each additional request to access any platform, increases the distance between those who teach and those who learn.
The best example that comes to mind of this transformation is one that almost no one thinks about anymore. When I started working in IT at a university, having a wireless network in a lecture hall was a nice extra, the kind you proudly mentioned in application brochures, alongside the renovated cafeteria. Today it's critical infrastructure, on the same level as electricity. Without it, there are no classes, no assessments, no research, no connection between people. This is where eduroam does what technology should do: disappear. The student going on Erasmus to Ljubljana and the researcher presenting a paper in Trondheim connect to the local network with their own institution's credentials, without asking anyone for favors and without having to hunt for passwords written on a piece of paper at reception.
Digital identity follows the same logic, albeit more discreetly. Federated authentication, in our case Autentica ID, solves a problem that for years was seen as inevitable: each platform requiring its own account and registration process. Today, with an institutional account, the same student can access b-on to consult scientific literature, Colibri for the Thursday Q&A sessions, Educast to review the class they missed, and FileSender to send their supervisor that huge file that no email service accepts. One key to many doors. It seems like a technical detail, but it has concrete pedagogical consequences: every minute a teacher doesn't spend resolving access issues is a minute they can invest in teaching.
Then there's e-learning, where technology shows its ambivalence. A platform can be a digital shelf, with the usual slides converted into PDFs and the textbook in a new guise. It works, nobody formally complains in the yellow book, and at the end of the semester, the assessment is that everything is there. But it can also be something completely different. Formative questionnaires that warn the student in the third week, not the thirteenth, that they haven't grasped the essential concept of the subject. Assessment rubrics published before the work, not after. Peer assessment, portfolios, asynchronous discussions that allow the working student to participate at eleven o'clock at night. Usage indicators that serve to identify who is falling behind and intervene before it's too late. The difference between these two scenarios is not in the software license, but in the pedagogical design and the resources to implement it.
The same reasoning applies to Artificial Intelligence, a topic that now occupies all hallway conversations and pedagogical council discussions. While producing text has become abundant and cheap, what has become scarce is knowing who is on the other side, their background, and their commitment. It is no coincidence that digital identity, verifiable credentials, and digitally signed micro-credentials have suddenly gained a centrality that a few years ago was the subject of a handful of enthusiasts in technical meetings.
None of this is built in isolation, and that's what I'd like to emphasize at the start of the academic year. More than the technological services themselves, I see the greatest value in the surrounding community, in the technical meetings, the workshops, and the phone calls between colleagues from different institutions who share the same headache and, often, the solution as well.
No one leaves a good class commenting on the quality of the wireless signal or the elegance of the authentication process, and that's precisely the point. The value of these infrastructures is measured in the conversations they made possible and the hours of closeness between those who teach and those who learn.
