Nathaniel Nelson / Winonan

Over its winter break, Winona State University made the transition to StarID for Desire to Learn (D2L) services. Students all over campus are asking: Why is it being changed? What is StarID? What does the change mean?

Kenneth Janz, associate vice president for Academic Affairs and chief information officer at Winona State, is in charge of the tech department at the university. As for what StarID is, Janz said it is something quite simple.

Minnesota State College and University system’s (MnSCU) website said StarID was a creation of the Identity and Access Management (IAM) program to create a single unique username and password combination for a student and for that single identifier to work at any of the MnSCU institutions.

“It was really created because, up in the metro area, students might take a class from Normandale Community College, and they might take a class from Century College. And then they might go to Metro State University,” Janz said. “Students would then have to know three usernames and passwords for each one of those institutions.”

Winona State, along with Bemidji State University, was one of the last schools to adopt the format after a few years of its existence.

“We’re not in the metro area, so we don’t have the same issues that happen in the cities, essentially,” Janz said. “We haven’t had a need.”

In December, MnSCU forced Winona State to finally begin its transition.

“Just recently, they turned off local identification for D2L,” Janz said. “For those people who don’t know, D2L is actually hosted up at system office, and they were authenticating back to our local services. Well, they turned it back, and they’re only authenticating out to

StarID now. That’s the first place people saw it, over winter break when we flipped the switch.”

The format consists of a randomly generated combination of two letters, four numbers, and then two more letters at the end. According to the

StarID website, by creating identifiers in this way, StarID can aoid the short comings of other identification methods.

For example, randomly generated IDs avoid any name-based problems like common combinations of first name and last name.

Does that mean that the old username and password combination had security issues?

“Absolutely not,” Janz said. “It’s just a local identifier.”

According to Janz, the switch to StarID is not over quite yet. With new laptop distributions coming up, new students and the students rotating their laptops out will both be bound to StarID, Janz said. For the rest of the students, the big change is coming in just a few months.

“We haven’t picked an exact date but sometime over summer we’re going to be switching,” Janz said. “So everything will have one username and password, and it will be StarID. By the fall, you will use StarID to log into everything.”

Luke Barlow, a Winona State tech support employee, works with students to fix both software and hardware issues. With the rollout of StarID, Barlow said students are confused but taking to the format quickly.

Even with any problem that it brings, Barlow said the shift to StarID will be a positive change for Winona State. With every service attached to the same username and password, there will no longer be a need for things like Warrior IDs or local usernames. Everything will be simplified and unified.

“From a student’s perspective, they mostly don’t understand,” Barlow said. “But slowly, freshmen are starting to get a hang of it from kids coming into walk-in support.”

While the change may seem like a simple switch for students, the transition for tech support employees is a bit more complex. According to Barlow, old processes they took for granted are now completely different.

“There’s a lot of learning how to do things again. We can’t reset passwords right now internally. We have to go through the MnSCU site,” Barlow said. “That’s the thing we’re going to have to work on.”

The ability to transfer easily between schools will be, along with primary implementation, the biggest change for Winona State. According to Barlow, this is a good thing.

“I think it’s going to be such a huge change, a culture change in Winona State,” Barlow said. “I think it’s going to be for the better.”