Improving Autodesk in Education

[Chris Marra]

Hey everyone,

For a senior consulting project at my college I'm working on a team with Autodesk to re-imagine the experience of using their products for education users. We're specifically focusing on their educational community [http://students.autodesk.com], but considering impact elsewhere. Right now we're exploring everything as a possibility for the project because our focus is on future designs rather than implementation, so we want to get a really good understanding of what our potential users want, think about the existing experience, and how they approach learning/using technical design products.

Since FIRST students interact heavily with the existing site and Autodesk is a huge sponsor of the program, I wanted to get the CD perspective on things. Our team has put together this general survey for people to fill out that we can source information from, but if you leave direct feedback here it'll still be super helpful.

Some of the things we're actively thinking about and would love to get your input on (given how successful of a community CD is, after all):

• What communities are you a part of and what keeps you coming back to them?
  
• With Autodesk or other design software, how did you originally learn to use it and was it effective?
  
• When you run across a problem you can't solve, how do you find more information to unstick yourself?
  
• Do/How do you share your work? Before, during, or after a project?
• If you have used it, what are your thoughts on the existing Education Community?
  

Again, don't feel like you need to answer these questions directly - any and all thoughts you have will be tremendously useful!

Thanks,
Chris Marra

[sanddrag]

I'm on the community since I'm a teacher. I use it for the software downloads which are great. What I would like to see implemented better is registration/authorization for more than one license per user, such as desktop and laptop, and easier re-authorization if you have to re-install Windows or something. It's always a pain.

I learned Autodesk Inventor way back on Version 5 with the built-in tutorials. I typically don't share my work.

The existing education community is a great resource for software downloads. The fact that this exists and all this software is available to students and educators easily and at no cost is the primary reason I choose Inventor over SolidWorks.

As a teacher, I see a lot of room for improvement in the area of curriculum and step-by-step tutorials, guides, and projects. I know this is asking for a lot (especially for free) but teachers are always very short on time. Anything that I can skim through and then direct students to, that gives them instructions to follow and then a challenge to complete goes a long way for me. Basically, I'm looking for more structured packaged educational exercises, primarily in Autodesk Inventor. It gives me more time for one-on-one help for struggling students and for providing better feedback when grading assignments.

If this could be expanded into an entire online class with tests and certification, that would be awesome!

I would also like to see Autodesk Vex curriculum integration into the online community.