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"Existing customers will be offered one year of Education Edition for free" (where existing customers refers to those who bought MinecraftEDU licenses) Theref

by patja 11y ago

"Existing customers will be offered one year of Education Edition for free" (where existing customers refers to those who bought MinecraftEDU licenses) Therefore we may surmise that Minecraft: Education Edition will be a subscription-based licensing model. Kind of a bummer but I get it, teachers are pretty resource-intensive to support, and the value comes from building up the community and resource/lesson/world sharing, which is an ongoing cost. The school where I teach had literally just last week decided to take the plunge and purchase some MinecraftEDU licenses. I'm just glad we will still have them in perpetuity (whatever that is good for in the constantly changing world of software!) along with the full retail copies that come along with it. Really I hope this will deliver on the promise of Minecraft in the schools. MinecraftEDU was a fine first step but it is clear that it will benefit from having the full resources of Microsoft behind it. Currently it is still a bit of a "throw the software at the community and hope something good comes of it" approach, which is very hit or miss. Teachers are making a lot of great lessons and activities using Minecraft, but many of them are very localized to exactly what that specific teacher is trying to accomplish and are difficult to generalize to "all 4th grade teachers can use this". I would liken it to what Scratch offered for coding in the classroom ("here's the toolset, have fun!"), as opposed to what Code.org brought to the table with more of a complete packaged lesson plan and hand-held guided experience through a coding activity using Scratch.

cdr 11y ago
$5/student/year with volume discounts available, according to the NYT piece.
- patja 11y ago
  a change to per user pricing is a huge change over how MinecraftEDU licensing works. $5 per student per year as opposed to the $18/license MinecraftEDU is priced at. With MinecraftEDU licenses if you are only going to have 30 licenses in use at one time (one classroom) you only need 30 licenses. 30 MinecraftEDU licenses runs a little over $450, one time cost. For a 500 student school under Minecraft: Education Edition you could be looking at $2,500 per year. That's making some assumptions about how they will restrict the license usage. I doubt many schools will see the benefit of having to buy a license for each individual student. The reality is that very few teachers are equipped with the skills to deliver a lesson using Minecraft, so mostly you will see a handful of teachers (at best, more likely zero or one) in a school embrace this. Another important question: will you still be entitled to a separate full retail Minecraft license for every education license purchased? That is a significant component of the current MinecraftEDU licensing. It enables school events and lessons using any mod or plugin, with self-hosted servers. I don't see this as all negative. I am hopeful that with the increased $$ flow will come better curriculum that is more generally applicable, as well as new features that might enable teachers who are novices with Minecraft to successfully use it in the classroom. Currently I would say only 1 out of 20 teachers has the skills required to pull this off today.
- douche 11y ago
  $5/student/year is really a steal, when you think about it in the bigger picture. That's like 2-3 days of school lunches, more like a single day, if you factor in school breakfasts. Or one Starbucks bullshitaccino...

by patja 11y ago

cdr 11y ago

$5/student/year with volume discounts available, according to the NYT piece.

patja 11y ago
a change to per user pricing is a huge change over how MinecraftEDU licensing works. $5 per student per year as opposed to the $18/license MinecraftEDU is priced at. With MinecraftEDU licenses if you are only going to have 30 licenses in use at one time (one classroom) you only need 30 licenses. 30 MinecraftEDU licenses runs a little over $450, one time cost. For a 500 student school under Minecraft: Education Edition you could be looking at $2,500 per year. That's making some assumptions about how they will restrict the license usage. I doubt many schools will see the benefit of having to buy a license for each individual student. The reality is that very few teachers are equipped with the skills to deliver a lesson using Minecraft, so mostly you will see a handful of teachers (at best, more likely zero or one) in a school embrace this. Another important question: will you still be entitled to a separate full retail Minecraft license for every education license purchased? That is a significant component of the current MinecraftEDU licensing. It enables school events and lessons using any mod or plugin, with self-hosted servers. I don't see this as all negative. I am hopeful that with the increased $$ flow will come better curriculum that is more generally applicable, as well as new features that might enable teachers who are novices with Minecraft to successfully use it in the classroom. Currently I would say only 1 out of 20 teachers has the skills required to pull this off today.
douche 11y ago
$5/student/year is really a steal, when you think about it in the bigger picture. That's like 2-3 days of school lunches, more like a single day, if you factor in school breakfasts. Or one Starbucks bullshitaccino...