Hello everyone,

I wanted to give the educators reading this forum a heads-up on an exciting new program offering for schools, and a small change to the age requirements for student accounts. If you have any questions on this new offering, please let us know.

As you're probably aware, we have a program in place that allows you to easily invite your students onto iATN, and within minutes they will have a (read-only) iATN account that you can use in the classroom to introduce them to a ton of real-world experience.

The first change we've just made is to lower the age requirement from 18 to 16 years of age.

We had quite a few requests from high school instructors that were also interested in using iATN in the class room, but ineligible due to the age of their students. We want to do everything we can to increase the number of young people interested in the automotive service industry.

In addition, there has been no way for them to take advantage of our search engine to dig into many of the older discussions and repairs that are documented on iATN themselves, short of paying to upgrade their own account to a premium level. Today, that changes.

We have a new premium access program for schools, built upon our Business+ premium membership type.

This program allows instructors to activate premium access to iATN for all of the school's current students and automotive instructors, for a single low price of $45 per month. To take advantage of this valuable offer, the primary account holder should upgrade an existing iATN account to Business+ or join as a new member and choose the Business+ account type.

Once your Business+ account has been activated, contact our support team via email (at [...]) or by phone (at 866-428-6428), and let us know you would like to begin adding students and instructors as sub-accounts, providing us with an estimate of how many students and instructors you may be adding. We will then unlock this additional functionality for you.

You will be able to easily activate and deactivate premium access for all of the students you have invited to join iATN, as well as your co-workers at the school. So you have full control over whether your students have the ability to search iATN.

You can even delegate the ability to manage your student's premium access to your co-workers, so that each instructor can control the access of their own students. All of this is available for a single monthly fee of $45/month per school location.

Obviously, we ask that you only use this with current students and instructors at your school, and as we develop the program, we will also be developing the process for segueing students out of their student account type as they move out of education and into the workforce.

In case you're not yet familiar with our student program:

One of the longest-running requests from educators and instructors on iATN was, "How can we get our students on here?" The primary roadblock was that students were not eligible for iATN, due to our requirement that a member have at least 4 years of automotive industry experience, or an ASE certification, or both. Dropping those requirements so that students could join would not have been a good option for our existing members, who are used to interacting on iATN with fellow professionals.

To solve this, in 2011 we developed a "student membership" account type on iATN. Students are eligible for this type of membership if they are 16+ years of age. They must be attending automotive educational training courses (whether it be high school, college, vocational, or similar), and referred by an educator/instructor that is an existing member of iATN. This last part is key -- students must be referred to iATN by educators and instructors, in order to be guaranteed acceptance in iATN.

Student memberships have almost the same privileges as regular membership accounts, with one caveat: they are "read-only." Students will be able to login to iATN, read through the hundreds of thousands of forum discussions (including all of the waveforms and other files found therein), TechHelp requests and fixes, OEM information, and the rest of the information found on iATN. And if one of their instructors has upgraded to Business+ and made them a sub-account, they can now also search the iATN Knowledge Base to assist in their studies of real-world repair cases.

However, they will not be able to post to iATN until they "graduate" to a full membership.

To invite your students to join iATN, please see:

http://members.iatn.net/invites/students/

To upgrade your account to Business+ level, please see:

http://members.iatn.net/upgrade/

Once upgraded, contact us to let us know you'd like to take advantage of this program, and how many students you'd expect to attend your school: [...].

Once we activate the feature, we'll let you know, and then you can control which students (and co-workers) are sub-accounts with premium access using this page:

http://members.iatn.net/config/sa/

Scott Brown
Administrator
iATN
Brea, California, USA