Textbook Resentment: Another Proposal to Adobe for Student Licensing During COVID and Beyond
On March 11, at the very beginning of the 2020 COVID-19 crisis, I wrote an open letter to Adobe on my blog and across social media platforms asking that they extend free trial licensing for students through the end of the semester, to allow courses to proceed as planned, and to allow students to work without interruption. (I was not the only one asking for this, there was a large groundswell of art and design professors asking for similar changes).
Adobe responded with a different offer. Students at institutions that had already purchased lab site licenses of Creative Cloud software would be able to use that software temporarily at home on their own computer under their school’s license until May 30 (currently extended to July 7).
This required complicated hurdles on the part of university IT departments, requiring IT admins to accept changes to legal licensing agreements, which they are generally not allowed to do without university legal sign-off. This took quite a while. Even after our own university successfully provisioned all known student accounts to the new at-home regime, I can’t tell you how many students contacted me because their Adobe accounts were not authenticating properly. One more thing on top of their quarantine stress.
Now all institutions are struggling with figuring out how to offer classes in the Fall. Some courses will be online only. Others will be hybrids with social distancing. Some labs may be available, some may not be. All the while art, media, and design professors are trying to decide how to deal with The Software Question.
Planning courses is hard enough, but now professors don’t really know if students will have reliable access to digital tools. The best solution for students across socio-economic statuses would be for Adobe to fundamentally rethink their student licensing structures. Let’s face it—computer labs were probably already on their last legs in 2020, and COVID-19 might have ended them on campuses forever. Really? Yes, more on that in another post.
“The best solution for students across socio-economic statuses would be for Adobe to fundamentally rethink their student licensing structures.”
Adobe currently uses: a 7-day trial, followed by a requirement to spend hundreds of dollars per year to be able to use the software in a private setting (students have to commit to a whole year to get an academic discount, even if they’re only taking one class). My proposal is simple: Adobe should dramatically extend free student licenses. There is precedent for this, represented by three main examples of methods:
Free fully-functional software for students. Autodesk makes fully-functional world-class software available for students for free while they are in school. 3D artists, engineers, and architects become proficient without worry about the bill, and then once they graduate from school they move into firms that use those same tools, or open their own businesses and license it themselves. This is the ideal.
Free versions with limits at the upper end of functionality. Blackmagic Design and Avid use another model, where a highly-functional version of their flagship software is free for students, but the highest end functions are limited to paid licenses. The trick here is finding the sweet spot of what to limit. Sometimes export format is limited to HD or a lossy codec, sometimes the limit is the number of tracks available. This method is ok for introductory students, but is less ideal for more serious students, because they will limit what they attempt based on what the software can do.
Extended fully-functional trials. Apple allows three-month demos of their professional audio and video software. This is excellent for intro students, because the length of the demo matches almost perfectly with the length of a semester. A student can feel free to work to their hearts content as a newbie, getting their feet wet without fear of having to spend a lot of money to complete the class. If they don’t return to the field, no harm no foul. But if they do take more classes they can get the software. It helps in this example that Apple’s pro software is very reasonably priced, even without student discounts.
Textbook pricing would be instructive here as a model for how not to treat students. Imagine the loyalty and good will Adobe would engender among young artists and designers if their software licensing for students did not feel like the predatory textbook industry. Think two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar chemistry textbooks, made “obsolete” by overly frequent new editions. This fosters piracy, encourages professors to look for workarounds, and engenders resentment toward the publishers. But publishers don’t care if students hate them, they don’t need to cultivate students as future clients—Adobe does.
My own classes are already software-agnostic, but often the best tool for the job is an expensive one, and I work to make it as easy and close to free as possible for students to use that tool if they need it. When toolmakers consider this as carefully as the teachers do, the relationship between user and software publisher becomes more symbiotic and extends far past the classroom setting.