The WiFi certification and other settings of the school are fundamentally different: in schools, users (students) have no pay-for-money but management relationships. The objective of the hotel WiFi certification is to make it easy for customers to access the Internet and to complete their billing, while the school WiFi certification aims to make it usable and unusable when it is not appropriate to use it, while meeting the requirements for real name and audit of online behaviour.
The student accounts come from where, and that is a prerequisite for all work.
The school scene.WiFi certification systemMost universities have a unified system of school-based management, with each student having one single number; primary and secondary schools may have a teaching management system or a cartoon system. The batching of student accounts through the matching systems is much more nuanced than by artificial creation.
The first is the problem of uniform formatting. In the same school, undergraduates, masters, PhD students and students studying abroad may have different numbering formats, either with letters in front or a pure number or a different length. If the certification system does not apply to compatible processing at the time of import, some students will be unable to log in.——The number of new students and seniors is changed significantly every year, the frequency of synchronisation is too low to cause delays in using a new-born account or the number of graduates has been kept in the system as a security gap. It is usually done by setting the data synchronized to one incremental update per day, increasing to one per hour during the student graduation and entry season.
The number of the account should be clearly defined. When a student enters school, he/she automatically creates and activates an account, is used during school, and the account number should be changed to a deactivated status within the prescribed time period (usually one to three months).——The students cannot lose their historical usage data because they change schools. These strategies need to be written into the program files at the project design stage, not one after the system is online.
Time control is a reality."You can use it when you need it."Core instruments.
There is a clear system of blackout in primary and secondary school dormitories and some university dormitories——It is no longer possible to access the Internet after 11 p.m., but this control cannot be applied in a single way: weekends and holidays may require easing time limits; examinations may need to be accompanied by strategies that will allow students to reduce their time on the Internet when they approach the season; and school hours are small during summer holidays, with time controls completely liberalized.
A good time control system should support a detailed time strategy by date type, grouping by user, and region. The dates should be at least four working days, weekends, holidays, examination week; the user groups can separate undergraduates, graduate students, teachers, and graduates may need 24-hour network privileges because of research needs.——The teaching building should not be staffed at night, but it should provide a network during the day and accommodation buildings may have limited hours of study during the day but require a network at a later stage.
It is also a question of how the system will deal with users already online when the breakup time comes."Five minutes to the net."Most schools choose a compromise: five minutes before the break-up and one minute each, allowing the current session to continue for 15 minutes after the break-off.
Visitors and temporary account management.
In addition to regular students and teaching staff, there are a large number of temporary users: outside school personnel who attend academic conferences, trainees who train for short periods, parents who come to the university and residents who eat in the cafeterias with WiFi. These users should not enter the official student accounts, but they cannot be excluded altogether.——The system is used by the administration within the school to generate a time-bound visitor account or access micromail clearance that allows visitors to complete provisional certification through attention to the school public.
The user accounts are managed with several key points: first, the validity period must be clear and usually set at one to seven days; second, the bandwidth and access rights of visitors should be distinguished from that of regular students, such as that visitors can only visit the Internet without accessing the school resource network; third, visitors’ online behaviour is also subject to real name and audit logs, and regulatory requirements do not distinguish between official users and visitors.WiFi certification systemInherent support is provided in the account management module, rather than by patching.
Management of equipment quantity and MAC address binding.
Students now have far more than one or two devices.——The student experience is very poor if the certification system limits each account to only one or two MAC addresses. If there is no limit on the number of MACs, it may also cause a security risk after the account has been stolen.
A reasonable compromise is that each student account allows for the binding of 5-8 MAC addresses, and beyond the maximum limit students can manage their own list of devices on a self-service page to untie any equipment that they do not use. Meanwhile, the system should record the binding and replacement of the MAC address as a logbook, triggering security alerts when an account number changes equipment frequently. If a student account has replaced more than three different MAC addresses within one day, it may be account leaks or a student sharing account number for other people.
Data on student network behaviour use borders.
Schools can access information about student Internet hours, traffic consumption, types of websites and so on through certification systems that are valuable in teaching management and student coaching. But the boundaries at which data are used must be clear: what data is available for pedagogical analysis, what is personal privacy and what needs to be communicated and agreed to in advance. This is not a technical question; it is a matter of compliance management and ethical boundaries.
The real difficulty of building a campus WiFi certification system without a particularly high technical threshold is that——It requires a deep combination of the school’s informative base, management system, student behavioral characteristics, and compliance requirements. By using WiFi certification as an independent IT project, it will detect leaks when it is online; and by planning it in the overall framework of school informatization, it will make the system longer and less costly to carry on.