Single Sign On(SSO) solution for Thinkific with JWT

Single Sign On For Thinkific

Thinkific provides a platform that allows businesses or people to use their existing resources and knowledge to create and deliver online courses. Companies/People usually have an existing application/site where student credentials are already stored. Thinkific allows its users to use their existing credentials to log in to their Thinkific platform using JWT (JSON Web Token). An interface needs to be created on the existing site that can generate that JWT token and log students into Thinkific using their existing credentials. miniOrange has a solution to this problem.

About Thinkific

Thinkific provides a platform that allows businesses or people to create and deliver online courses without any design or technical expertise. It allows its users to use their existing resources to set up online courses using an easy to use interface. Thinkific offers tools for setting up courses, managing students, payments, and marketing to reach a bigger audience. Its a one-stop shop for all your Online Course needs.

Challenge

Thinkific users want a continuous and seamless access to their portal through their existing accounts. They don't wish for their students to have a separate set of credentials for logging in to Thinkific. Thinkific provides a way for its users to allow their students to log in to the platform seamlessly. But, an interface needs to be created which would allow this.

Solution

miniOrange provides an integrated solution where a logged in user's existing session can be used to log the users into Thinkfic by creating a valid JSON Web Token ( JWT ). Thinkific user is relieved from maintaining separate user credentials for its students.

As a result, miniOrange Single Sign-On (SSO) solution is implemented by installing miniOrange IDP plugin. Thinkific users can now login into Thinkific platform using their existing credentials.

Steps to configure IDP Plugin:

Go to the IDP Provider settings in the plugin.

Obtain the following information from Thinkific:

I. JWT Endpoint URL: Example : https://{your-school}.thinkific.com/api/sso/v2/sso/jwt
II. The API Key ( Shared Secret )

In Identity provider tab of IDP plugin enter the values:

Application Name	Choose appropriate name according to your choice.
App JWT Endpoint URL	JWT Endpoint fetched from JWT in the previous step.
Shared Secret	The API Token fetched from Thinkific dashboard
Hashing Algorithm [For Signed Request]	Choose sha256 by default
Return to URL	The URL where you want users to be redirected to after SSO process.