The Autodesk Education Community (Click Here) is a website created by Autodesk to provide educational curriculum and software to instructors and students all over the world. Late last year, Autodesk expanded the Education Community in a significant way: they began offering 13-month software licenses for students to use at home at no charge. Recently, Autodesk changed the license length to 3 years for some software. This has significantly changed the way that students and teachers learn and implement a wide variety of software ranging from 3D animation to Mechanical Engineering. This post is going to cover:

1. How to register you & your school for an account in the Education Community
2. How to invite your students to the website
3. How to download your software once you have the account.

How to Register for the Education Community

• Go to this website. Once you’re there, click the “Register” Button at the top-right of the page, as shown below:

• After clicking “Register”, you will be brought to a web page that contains a form that you must fill out.
• You must have a school email address in order to register for the community. A school email address is assigned to you (a faculty member) by the school district. (A school issued email address typically contains a domain address of .edu. Other forms of school-issued email addresses are schoolname.k12.ca.us and a variety of other ones depending on the state your school resides in.) Autodesk’s system will check your email domain address and verify that it is, in fact, a valid school that is eligible for the education community.
• The verification process may take up to several days to actually have your account activated. Upon submitting the information, Autodesk will send you an email regarding your registration. You must read the email and follow the instructions within it in order to activate and use your account. If your school has strong spam filters, make sure you talk with your IT department and have them add [email protected] to a safe senders list. This will ensure that you receive the email without any issues.
• Keep in mind that students can register for the community themselves but only if they have been assigned a school email address. Otherwise, they must be invited by a faculty member who is registered to the community, or they can submit a request to a faculty member by going here.

Inviting Students
Once your account is created and activated, you can begin inviting your students to the community.

• First, log in to your education community account by clicking “Log in” at the top-right of the education community page.
• Once you’re logged in, verify that you are a faculty member by scrolling down to the bottom of the page. You will see two drop-down boxes. One says “Community” and the other says “Discipline”. Ensure that “Faculty” is selected under the “Discipline” section. This gives you the ability to invite students and do other administrative tasks within the Education Community.
• Once you have confirmed that you are listed as a faculty member, click the “My School” link on the left side of the page.
• Once that is done, you will see statistics for your school. Click the link at the top-right of this page that says “Teachers: Invite your students!”
• Upon clicking this link, you will be taken to a page that gives you two options of inviting students. The first option is to send a special URL that Autodesk creates to your students via email. When the student clicks on the URL, it will automatically bring them to a page where they fill out some information and register their account to the school. The second method is to post an HTML-coded “badge” to a website for the students to access. They can click the button on the badge and it will bring them to the registration page for the school.
• Once they are registered, they will have access to the software downloads.

Downloading Software
Now that you and your students are registered and can access the Education Community; you can start downloading software. To do this, click the “Get Software” button at the top of the page.

• Upon doing this, you will be brought to a software download page. You can go through the list of available software and download the ones that you want. As an example, let’s say that you want to download Revit Architecture 2011.
• First, you would look through the list and find the tab named “Autodesk Revit Architecture”. Once you find it, click on the tab and it will drop it down and give you further options.
• You can view the system requirements if you want, download extensions, view other people within your school who use the software, and even look at designs that other people have made for the software.
• To download the software, you would click the drop-down box where it says “Select your Version…” In the drop-down box, you want to select the appropriate version for your computer’s Operating System and your spoken language.
• To find out if your Windows operating system is 32 or 64-bit, click Start > Control Panel > System. The System information window that comes up will tell you whether you are running 32-bit or 64-bit. If it does not specify, then you most likely have a 32-bit system. Some of the software has the 32-bit and 64-bit installer bundled together.
• After picking the appropriate version from the drop-down menu, you will be brought to a page that offers you a download link as well as a serial # link. You need the serial # in order to install and activate your software.
• To download the software, click the “Download” button. Upon clicking the button, a serial # and product key will automatically be generated and shown to you. Save this information because you will need it later. The software will automatically start downloading using Autodesk’s built-in downloading tool.
• If you are having trouble using the downloader utility, scroll to the bottom of the page and click the link that says “if you are having trouble with your download, please click here to download using your browser.” This will allow whatever browser you are using to use its own downloader to download the software.
• Once the software is downloaded, run the Executable. It will extract files to a location on your hard drive and then run the setup process.
• Once the software is installed, you will need to activate the serial #. Once you have activated then your software is good to go for however long the serial # is set to last.

Autodesk Rules
As per Autodesk’s End User License Agreement, the software and serial #’s that are downloaded from the education community are not to be used for anything outside of personal education at home. The Education Community software and serial #’s cannot be used for commercial business or for teaching in a classroom environment. The Education Community software is to be specifically used by instructors or students at home on their own computers. Autodesk has the right to pursue legal action against anybody who does not use the Education Community software as it is intended to be used; for students and teachers for their own personal education outside of the classroom.

Frequently Asked Questions
If you have further questions regarding the Education Community or downloading your free Education Community software, then you should contact your local Authorized Autodesk Reseller. You can find your nearest reseller here. Also, Autodesk provides an FAQ list for the Education Community, which can be found here.
I hope this has been informative. If you have a question for me specifically, feel free to leave a comment and I will do my best to respond. Thank you.
– Mark Philipp