I thought I'd share our experiences at Newcastle with shib based login the Microsoft's Dreamspark offer. The same kind of setup should be possible for our peer organisations.
Microsoft offer pretty much all their development software (i.e. everything bar office) to STEM students and educators. They offer some development software (e.g. visual studio) to all students and staff.
We have setup shib login to the Kivuto portal that grants access to this offer and set an attribute that tell them if the user qualifies for the enhanced STEM offering or the basic offering. This has worked well and greatly reduced the barrier to entry and admin overhead. This used to involve uploading spreadsheets of qualifying students and then getting them to register. The user experience is now seamless, users login to the site and access what they are eligible for. A low barrier to entry and a campaign of awareness raising has boosted uptake.
We have been running this for 2 years now and it is working well. This year the value of software downloaded by university members from the Microsoft Dreamspark service was £1.71 million. The service was used by 1,078 members who downloaded 2,681 software applications for free. The total value of software downloaded for free over the lifetime of the offer is £3.4 million
I hope this helps other institutes
Kind Regards
Cal
Caleb Racey
Systems Architecture Manager
Newcastle University
|