Duo and the College Professor: Impact in the Classroom?

[mbachman]

Has anyone had any experience with Duo’s impact in the college classroom, where faculty have presentation podiums with computers and need to access varoius Duo-protected universty apps?

Thoughts, tips, and “adoption resistance mitigation” ideas welcome!

[Allan_Edwards]

We didn’t have any significant issues with this except when we had browser version checking enabled. The lab computers are frozen and the browser is never quite up-to-date. The several screens of nagging to suggest that the user update are especially poorly received since, with the computer being frozen, there is nothing they can do. We disabled that particular feature as a result of this. On a more positive note Professors have to Duo auth to access Canvas (the LMS) but they’ve dealt with this without issue.

[Steve_M]

Yubikeys may be an option, but there are cons to that approach as well. IMO they are faster than the mobile app (especially for web apps in Chrome using U2F) and arguably more secure. That being said they are an additional cost, an additional item for the university to manage, it’s one more thing for the professor to carry, requires access to the computers USB ports (some places may have the PC in a locked cabinet), and the computers must accept a smart card/OTP device being plugged in (that’s what a yubikey is identified as). A quick search will net some major universities using yubikeys for students and/or staff (also https://www.yubico.com/about/reference-customers/), and I think Duo uses them internally. I am in healthcare and we have decided to keep a small number of these on hand if we have certain cases where we need an alternative to the mobile app or call-back (we don’t allow SMS).