Thousands of Identity Providers Needed One Identity Broker
In the past, Blackboard had a fragmented approach to identity. “A client would set up identity with one of our products, and then they’d sign up for another product and have to start over a little differently with a slightly different feature set,” explains Michel Courson, Blackboard’s senior director of enterprise architecture. “So the biggest business problem that we’re trying to solve here is to have a single Blackboard identity. You do it once and then it works everywhere.”
Achieving this unified identity posed a challenge for Blackboard since each customer acts as its own identity provider. “What we’re doing here is integrating with their identity providers, and we’re using Auth0 as a ball carrier between those identity providers to make it look like one identity provider for us on the inside,” says Courson. It’s the same principle as social login, but instead of using a handful of identity providers like Google and Facebook, each school provides the login credentials for its students.
Single Sign On (SSO) has been set up to offer a seamless user experience, and it’s being rolled out across the entire Blackboard ecosystem. Having a single user ID for all educational properties allows for data-fueled personalization, where insights can surface about users’ learning behaviors and outcomes.
To implement this unique use case, Blackboard relied on Auth0’s support. “In terms of prototyping a solution, we actually went very far just by using Auth0's documentation and what was publicly available,” Courson says. When the team needed more help, they turned to Auth0’s professional services team. “At critical points in our development process, we held workshops with the consultants,” says Courson. “We would explain to them what we're doing, present our plans, and then they would work with us to refine the designs and explore all of the edge cases. Understand the way that the API, the rate limits, and so on would work together, and make sure that our design would work the way we intend it to.”
“What we’re doing here is integrating with their identity providers, and we’re using Auth0 as a ball carrier between those identity providers to make it look like one identity provider for us on the inside.”

Michel CoursonSenior Director of Enterprise Architecture