New Program Announcement for Educators
Posted to Educators Forum on 2/7/2014
17 Replies
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