Another institution for higher education has embraced mobile ID technology for students. In this case, it’s the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, which has made mobile ID the default for incoming students for the 2022 school year, though students still have the option of asking for a physical ID card.
Speaking to the school’s paper, Auxiliary Services Marketing Director Katie Turner was unusually keen to emphasize that UNC Charlotte was not at the cutting edge of the mobile ID trend.
“Over the past few years, a lot of universities have gone to mobile credentials. It’s just where things are going now,” she said. “So we are not the exception, and we are not the first.”
That having been said, the use of mobile student IDs is still very much a new phenomenon. But a handful of schools, including prominent names like MIT, have indeed been transitioning to the smartphone-based ID system, often enabling students to use it to access school facilities and even to make purchases at school cafeterias and other on-campus retail establishments. That is the case at UNC Charlotte, where students can use their mobile IDs to access dining halls and check their meal plan balances.
In rolling out their new mobile ID systems, schools often frame them as an innovative effort at digital transformation. UNC Charlotte’s Turner, however, described the school’s mobile ID transition as “part of a larger sustainability initiative with Auxiliary Services,” the school’s operations department. The idea is that dramatically reducing the need to print physical student IDs will reduce UNC Charlotte’s waste and its environmental footprint.
The student mobile ID trend is, of course, a subset of the much larger global trend toward mobile ID systems that let citizens and residents very their identities using virtual credentials on their smartphones.
Source: Niner Times
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