ALEKS is a testing service used for placement at UAF.  

Per discussion with vendor and with UAF service owners Amy Barnsley and Latricie Bowman, students are assigned to a cohort, which becomes part of the URL used to access the service, like:

https://secure.aleks.com/shiblogon/sso?entityID=urn:mace:incommon:alaska.edu&class_code=EPEVQ-MCT4K

Regarding the cohorts, vendor contact provided this amplification:

On Tue, 14 Jan 2014, at 12:46 , Marc Harper <mharper@aleks.com> wrote:

Amy, David,
 
There are two options for specifying the cohort in the SSO URL:

class_code=XXXXX-XXXXX: Any student clicking on that link will end up in XXXXX-XXXX irrespectively of whether they’ve already used PPL previously (i.e. are in another active cohort already).

enroll_class_code=XXXXX-XXXXX: Only students who are not enrolled in PPL yet will end up in XXXXX-XXXXX. Existing students will remain in their current cohort.

If you plan to have overlapping cohorts, for instance year long cohorts with one starting in the spring and one in the fall, enroll_class_code is the better option, since you won’t have to track student usage on your end when rendering your placement webpage (or forwarding the students to ALEKS). Note that students can manually enter the class code for a more recent cohort from their ALEKS student home after logging in. So if you have a situation where a student needs to use PPL again in a future year, they just need to be provided with the class_code.

From there management of the cohorts can be done entirely on your end if you desire. When you need new cohorts in a subsequent year, just use the duplication option in the PPL admin interface to copy all the settings of an existing cohort and adjust the dates (and options if desired). The duplicated cohort will have a new class_code so you can direct students to the new cohort whenever you are ready to do so. Of course if you don’t remember this in a year, just let us know and we can help set up the new cohorts.
 
Please let me know if you have any questions!

Best,
 
Marc

On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 11:15 AM, David Bantz <dabantz@alaska.edu> wrote:

I configured our (University of Alaska) IdP to provide ALEKS appropriate SAML assertion of authentication and requested attributes, and provided an example of the SAML assertion sent (copied below) on 13 December.