Validating and authenticating student accounts

[Anonymous]

I am a middle school teacher who teaches every 8th grader in our school (300 kids a year) how to design and 3D prints parts with Fusion. It has become a love/hate relationship with Fusion due to setting up the students' accounts. For the last 3 years I would have every student create an account, they would enter their school email address, dob, school, enrollment date, graduation date, etc. After all of the that they would have 30 days to use the software. After a few times through the process I discovered that you have to back to the Autodesk site and click "sign in" and then "get access". After that they would go back to Fusion and click "continue" which would prompt the message: "Your registration is being processed". Usually a day or 2 later their accounts would work. You would get that same message whether regardless of whether you went back to the site to "get access". While that process might not sound difficult- try doing with 20 eighth graders at a time. 🙂

Unfortunately an already tedious process got worse. Last week I had a new student join my class and now Autodesk requires proof that he is a student. I am not sure why his school email is no longer sufficient. In 2 months when I get a new group of 120 eighth graders I have no idea how I am going to get them all set up/validated. Please help!

Thanks

[sagarl · Accepted solution]

Hi Andy,

Thanks for your question. Autodesk is proud to provide free access to our professional products for students and educators in support of education and it's great to hear you've chosen Fusion 360 to teach your students how to design and 3D print parts. Here's some help to quickly get your students up and running with an education license for Fusion 360.

Step 1: Ask your students to create an Autodesk account from the education page for Fusion 360.

Step 2: Have them complete their email address, date of birth, school name, enrolment and graduation dates. This will then auto-populate a form, where your students should check their details are correctly recorded and then click the "verify" button. 
Please note that Autodesk is currently running a pilot with a 3rd party verification services provider, SheerID, to determine customers' eligibility to receive an education license. At this time, not all of your students may be asked to "verify", and they can proceed directly to step 3. However, for those students who are asked to "verify" it's very important that the student name and school name are accurate.

Step 3: Once the account is successfully created, go back to the education page for Fusion 360, have the student sign into their account and they should immediately be able to click the "Get Access" button - it is this step that updates their account with an education license and provides access for longer than the 30 day commercial trial.

Step 4: Sign in to Fusion 360 through the desktop client. It may take a day or so for the license type to show up as "educational", but your student will have immediate access to Fusion 360 and can start designing and making.

Hope this helps and send us any additional feedback you have.

[Anonymous]

1,2,3...

[KhendricksonDJFWU]

Having the same issue except all of our schools are gone for the middle schools. and Middle school isn't even an option when registering on the education site. (https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/students-teachers-educators). Is it this SheerID thats wiping out our registration options? How can I get my classes up and going before the new kids come in? Right now this is impacting our kids who are trying to do the Certiport certifications to get HS credits early.

-Kyle H.

[kmcgheeCMFPG]

Hi, I too am in the very same boat, I used Fusion for all my students, and for multiple disciplines, from drafting class to CNC metal fab. I tried your way mentioned above, I am constantly dumped back to the verify page wanting a copy of their student ID. Our school district policy forbids me to let students use their ID's for privacy concerns. I suspect this will be an issue in many school districts. Is there not some better way to do this. Let me use my work ID which is not a privacy thing, to register my school, and then when students sign up using my school I have the option somewhere to say yes they are actually a student? Or how about upon proving I am a teacher using your software you provide me with 30 logins and passwords to use as a class set?

I realize Autodesk wants to ensure their product is being used properly but this way of doing signups is not feasible.

[sagarl]

Hi Kyle,

Thanks for your feedback and sorry to hear that you’re experiencing difficulties finding your school in the list. Autodesk is proud to provide free access to our professional products for students and educators in support of education and it’s great to hear you’re using Fusion 360 in your classes. Please be assured that I have informed the team managing this project of your concerns and that we will look for options to improve the experience and provide more seamless access to the software moving forwards.

Some thoughts on getting you / your class up and running as quickly as possible:

1. Have you checked the High School list for your school name? If it is not there, I recommend you follow the pathway to “Request to Add School”, which should address this issue moving forwards.
2. In the meantime, since validation of schools not already on the approved list can take some time, you can choose to access a free 30 day commercial trial. Once your school is added to the list, this license can then be converted to an Education license, by going through the verification workflow.

Please note that since this is a pilot, not all of your students may be asked to “verify” at this time, and they can proceed directly to create/ sign in to their account and access education licenses for the software, as previously.

I appreciate this is not an ideal experience and thank you for your patience as we work on fixes. Please keep your feedback coming.

[sagarl]

Hi,

Thanks for your feedback. I acknowledge your issue and have passed your concern and suggestions onto the project team for immediate consideration.

Please note that since this is a pilot, not all of your students may be asked to “verify” at this time, and they can proceed directly to create/ sign in to their account and access education licenses for the software, as previously.
If a student is asked to “verify”, they need to provide a piece of school-issued documentation that shows their

• First name
• Last name
• School name
• Date showing current enrollment

Other forms of acceptable documentation could include the following, some of which I hope your students would be permitted to upload without privacy concern:

• Registration receipt
• Tuition receipt
• Class schedule
• Official letters
• Transcript
• Employee ID or link to faculty listing on school website

Lastly, I’d like to reassure you that SheerID only uses someone's information to confirm their eligibility. They do not rent their information. They do not sell their information. They do not store documents or images uploaded to their system and you can read their full privacy policy here.

I hope this is somewhat helpful and please keep your feedback coming.

[jgreenEBECL]

I thought I would reply in here as it is the same concern I am having. 

I am teaching at  an inner-city school with students who have English as an additional language, SEN, and low ability. It was difficult enough having to get them to go through the email verification process, but the accounts I am setting up with new classes are now also asking for this I.D. 

They do not have photo ID at all. Uploading names and details of their enrolment will not be in line with the Multi Academy trust's data policy. 

Surely if the IT team have registered the whole domain, then any username @thatdomain.org should be eligible. I'm wanting to teach every single student coming through the school CAD, but I'm not sure the stress of this sign up process is worth sticking with Fusion360 as a product. 

Please help! 

[Anonymous]

There's pretty much no chance any school subject to GDPR is going to volunteer such information on behalf of it's pupils. I strongly urge you to get rid of SheerID. We now have several pupils who are unable to use your software thanks to this.

[sagarl]

Hi jgreenEBECL,

Thanks for taking the time to share your experience, feedback and suggestion. Please be assured that I have passed this along to the team running this pilot for consideration and hope that we’ll be able to provide a more streamlined experience for validating user eligibility to access education licenses in due course.

Thank you and best regards

[jgreenEBECL]

It doesn't really fix my current predicament. I have hundreds of pupils who have to go through this within the next few weeks. The validation was working perfectly until recently. I need some reassurance that it will be sorted soon?!

[sagarl]

Hi jgreenEBECL,

I think it may be helpful to clarify between email verification and verification of eligibility to access Autodesk products with an Education license. The first, email verification, is what I believe you are referring to as “working perfectly until recently”. Email verification is an industry standard workflow that verifies that a user has entered a valid email address associated with the account they are creating. A subset of users are now additionally being asked to provide proof of enrolment or employment at school to verify their eligibility to access Autodesk products with an Education license. This is currently a pilot and we’re grateful for your feedback, which will help shape the verification experience we release more broadly.  Autodesk is proud to provide free access to our professional products for students and educators in support of education and verifying the legitimate use of education licenses will help to ensure we can maintain this offering.

Please note that since this is a pilot, not all of your students may be asked to “verify” at this time, and they can proceed directly to create/ sign in to their account and access education licenses for the software, as previously.

If a student is asked to “verify”, they need to provide a piece of school-issued documentation that shows their

First name

Last name

School name

Date showing current enrollment

Other forms of acceptable documentation could include the following, some of which I hope your students would be permitted to upload without privacy concern:

Registration receipt

Tuition receipt

Class schedule

Official letters

Transcript

Employee ID or link to faculty listing on school website

Lastly, I’d like to reassure you that SheerID only uses someone's information to confirm their eligibility. They do not rent their information. They do not sell their information. They do not store documents or images uploaded to their system and you can read their full privacy policy here.

I hope this is somewhat helpful.

[gerberm]

This process does not work and many of our students cannot access Fusion beyond the trial date.   This is frustrating and I have gone through this process for past several months to no avail.  The only way it would work is if I would send a speadsheet to Autodesk with their names.  We wait a day or so and nothing happens.  It used to work extremely well and now, well it has forced us to look at other options.  We did have a work around where we would use a computer with an older version of Fusion to just register, but that stopped working.   I would seriously consider other options if you were planning on teaching Fusion360.  The software is great, but the support is seriously lacking for those who rely on it to get students certified.  

[gerberm]

I am providing an update to this situation.  I was able to get on chat support and they seemed to resolve the issues we were having to register student accounts from the Trial Version that had expired to the Student Accounts.  You need to have them register for the Educational Account prior to this step.  The process is this: 

1. Make sure Fusion 360 is closed.

Click on the Start button and type:

%localappdata%\Autodesk\Web Services 

Press Enter.

2. Right-click the LoginState.xml file and left-click Delete.

3. Relaunch Fusion 360.

This process fixed the Fusion360 Trial Account issues.   Once the LoginState.xml was deleted, the students could then login and their accounts were accepted as Education Accounts and no longer in the trial state.  

[Anonymous]

How does one check or get their school on the "High School List"? That reply is about as useless as the majority of the Autodesk Knowledge Base, because I can't find anything but posts from other people with the same problem complaining. 

I understand this is a free thing for Schools, but there are plenty of other companies that offer products free for EDU use that can actually make it easy for a School to use them. Even Adobe can manage a method of generating student accounts from a Schools AD or Google.

One would expect that the free aspect is to get students familiar with your product and more likely to use or recommend it when they get into the workforce but all this does is reinforce what a pain in the arse it is to deal with Autodesk.

It wasn't the easiest to setup labs with this in the first place but we finally got it working out ok, then Autodesk goes and makes it very difficult to setup students with an education account so they can use the software. If this doesn't improve it's highly likely that we will have to consider a different product for the new school year.

---

@sagarl wrote:

Hi Kyle,

Thanks for your feedback and sorry to hear that you’re experiencing difficulties finding your school in the list. Autodesk is proud to provide free access to our professional products for students and educators in support of education and it’s great to hear you’re using Fusion 360 in your classes. Please be assured that I have informed the team managing this project of your concerns and that we will look for options to improve the experience and provide more seamless access to the software moving forwards.

Some thoughts on getting you / your class up and running as quickly as possible:

1. Have you checked the High School list for your school name? If it is not there, I recommend you follow the pathway to “Request to Add School”, which should address this issue moving forwards.
2. In the meantime, since validation of schools not already on the approved list can take some time, you can choose to access a free 30 day commercial trial. Once your school is added to the list, this license can then be converted to an Education license, by going through the verification workflow.

Please note that since this is a pilot, not all of your students may be asked to “verify” at this time, and they can proceed directly to create/ sign in to their account and access education licenses for the software, as previously.

I appreciate this is not an ideal experience and thank you for your patience as we work on fixes. Please keep your feedback coming.

---

[Anonymous]

I have to say I am in agreement with all other teachers regarding safe working practices with children and giving away their data. Who ever designed this system is clearly not up to speed with data protection and working with children. It is such a shame this validating accounts which was tricky enough on a good day with students has just got a lot harder.

I agree with previous comment on the thread. Any address at the registered domain name should be able to get an account. School IT security forbids nmost institutions having anyone on the domain that is not a registered students for alsorts of reasons including again child protection. Auto desk Im not sure how US schools work but this verification process is a real ball ache here in the UK.

Chris

[lars.waara]

It is very, VERY time consuming and frustraiting process to get a Inventor for my student. We are a senior High School located in Botkyrka, Sweden.

screenshot from Sheer ID.

I finally got our school to be recognized as a school. ( at least that what I thought)

It says "Tumba Gymnsium" is Eligible. 

Just to be on the safe side I had my principal write a letter to confirm that we actually are school. (it did not look so official). I also went outside and took a picture of the school where it clearly said "Tumba Gymnasium" with big letters on top of the entrence. Then I took a picture for myself, the classroom and my student.

Do not think it was needed thou, it seems as Sheer ID just confirmed our website.

Then I tried myself to se if my studetns finally can get the software.

But no....

requst form

The system still does not recognize Tumba Gymnasium as a school.

Also got a question.

When Tumba Gymnasium get recognized as a school, what do my student have to do to prove they actually go here?

Can I ask them to take a screen shot of their scedule where "CAD" is visible?

That will probably be legal even with GDPR, since it does not share private information.

I am not sure that is legal for me to supply a class list with the name of my students to Autodesk.

(it can be but I am  not sure)

[dylanmatthewsison]

not that google is the best source for information but...

[Anonymous]

NOt sure why you have posted this SAGARL?

I'm not looking for reviews on SheerID... I know its rubbish, and so do Autodesk but they are just getting the guts to fess up and change it. It's a very bad system Autodesk are using and get the feeling they know this from a number of support operators.  For a web-based operator, they have created a really difficult system to keep students needing fusion out, at the expense of trying to stop some pilfering of the educational licences.

[Anonymous]

Believe me your problem don't finish there when you have got passed sheer ID ther is now an almost impossible task to "get product' and then checking each kid has the software on their profile.

Its absolute ****show of a system Im sorry to say.

Autodesk shame on you for not sorting this out. Esp during a time when teachers are using Fusion remotely during lock downs and electronic learning activities.