Validating education accounts help...

[Anonymous]

Dear Autodesk,

I have to say that I am in agreement with many teachers posting on the Autodesk forum about the difficulty in validating education accounts for students in college and schools.

I agree with many teachers that for Autodesk to be asking for more information than students names and email addresses is nonsense. No school in their right mind would allow any person to have an email address with their domain name for a whole host of reasons around child safety and contravention of the institutions IT policy. No school in their right mind will give more than a students name to validate their accounts and Autodesk should be doing more for schools to validate themselves and then allowing students with the same domain name to register to use their products.  Every school I have worked in for the last 15 years forbids anyone outside the organization any access to the institutions email facility. This being the cas why isn’t simly a domain name email address enough all of a sudden?

I currently have 600 students trying to validate their accounts and the response from Autodesk is not consistent. I have had each students uploading a letter from the school on headed paper with my signature on and the school stamp with their name on confirming they are a student at British Int School HCMC Vietnam.  Student have also uploaded a picture of my a photo of my ID card confirming that I am Head of Design and Technology at BIS. Some students are validated and others have come back saying this is not enough information. Well Autodesk any school sharing transcripts and reports with your 3rd party validator, will be breaking data protection in many countries.

I really don’t understand why Autodesk can’t make more of schools validating themselves (I would happy to spend time jumping through hoops to do this but I do not have time to sit with individuals helping them validate their accounts) and then students getting an easy ride to validate their own accounts. Autodesk this is going wrong for you at the moment and myself, as well as a great many other colleagues of mine in Switzerland, UK, Germany and Thailand are all experiencing so many difficulties that we are actively looking for another solution for our CAD delivery in schools.

Chris Diver

Head of Design and Technology

British International School

Ho Chi Minh City

Vietnam

[leowarren34]

Hi @Anonymous,

It's understandable and I see this a lot on the forums,

The main issue I've come across is that some institutions have an alumni email address on the main domain intentionally which means filtering through who is and isn't a current student rather difficult. In an ideal world, a school would be able to bulk import an excel sheet of student email addresses and make all the accounts and verify as a cohort but unfortunately, it's not happened yet - I have asked.

I think it's also worth saying that students submitting your ID card may not be helpful as SheerID are checking if the student is part of the school rather than yourself. I'm surprised that school letters aren't working especially if they are status letters. If they're missing anything it would be covered here: https://damassets.autodesk.net/content/dam/autodesk/www/industries/education/docs/verification-faq.pdf