Educational Licences for my students

[Anonymous]

I've had a number of issues with SheerID for several months now. The issues include accrediting my college as an educational institution (we're rather well known and with a clear, obvious, conventional, normal and expected website/presence/centre number etc. to support this), teacher validation and licence renewal, and student registering and renewal.

For this specific post i would like to highlight two failings:

1. Validated student licenses only last (now) for 12 months. Students in the UK study D&T or STEM subjects for a minimum of three years, often 5. Potential solutions for this are to link validation to domains - the overwhelming vast majority of school students and university students only have access to their educational email domain whilst students. Alternatively, asking for validation documents which also include a start date and duration or end of study date.

2. SheerID are slow, inconsistent, and incommunicative. Though they have a great reputation in their field, I have seen little evidence of it. The documents provided for a class are successful 90% of the time; 1 in 10 pupils, using the same document, are rejected by SheerID without explanation (see https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-support/validating-education-licence-for-students/m-p/9492...- these requirements are clearly met). This has a serious impact in digital and design educational outcomes, not endearing Autodesk to teachers and students. Also, in following up on my own licence renewal validation, that of my colleagues, and that of our students, their response has been poor at best.

I can see few simple solutions for this other than greater accountability and communicability between SheerID and Autodesk, Having a clearer support channel for overstretched teachers with either SheerID/Autodesk on licencing issues is my first thought. 

Assuming the educational licencing business model is to get the coming generation of designers/engineers etc. to prefer Autodesk, these are significant risks to success of such a model.

Specific assistance with these issues would be appreciated. Particularly in registering a domain and, if possible, registering for notifications/mailings when the educational registration/validation process changes.

(thread started at the request of Peter Doering)