ESRI's ArcGIS Available for Faculty, Staff, and Students

ESRI believes geography is at the heart of a more resilient and sustainable future. Governments, industry leaders, academics, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) trust us to connect them with the analytic knowledge they need to make these critical decisions that shape the planet. (from ESRI's Vision Statement) ESRI offers ArcGIS for designing and managing solutions that comprise ArcGIS for Desktop software to discover patterns, relationships, and trends in the data in databases, spreadsheets, or statistical packages. (from Bloomberg BusinessWeek Company Snapshot)

Murray State University, through the Mid-America Remote Sensing Center, offers and supports a variety of ESRI's ArcGIS software products for faculty, staff, and student academic use. The ESRI software of primary interest to most users is ArcGIS for Desktop. ArcGIS for Desktop is the cornerstone application for the analysis of spatial patterns throughout a vast assortment of industries and disciplines.

For users not particularly interested in enterprise GIS software, ESRI offers other means for visualizing geographic data, from ArcGIS Explorer to ArcGIS Online for Organizations. These apps allow access to geographic data through a small, downloadable app run from the desktop, to browser-based access to data already available online provided by GIS servers around the world.

Murray State also has access to ArcGIS Server, allowing for the publishing of GIS data to the general public. ESRI's Collector application allows users to collect field data, such as biology students collecting information about flora or fauna, agriculture students collecting field measurements, or students collecting campus information for building campus map apps.

Murray State University and the Mid-America Remote Sensing Center are members of the Council for Post-secondary Education Commonwealth of Kentucky Site License Agreement with ESRI. Each year, MARC pays a small fee, along with about 18 other universities in the Commonwealth of Kentucky in order to access the majority of ESRI software products.

Updated** The Commonwealth of Kentucky CPE/ESRI Statewide License Agreement covers academic, research, and administration use of ESRI's software products. Academic use includes faculty research, grants, and some contracts.¹ ArcGIS Desktop can also be used for serving the administrative aspects of the University, such as campus mapping projects, Facilities Management, and the research and analysis of service region demographics.

ESRI software products can be installed on any university-owned computer or laptop.

Students have access to free, one-year licenses of ArcGIS for Desktop.

Also available are about 80 free Virtual Campus courses. These ESRI-led courses provide educational and training opportunities for faculty, staff, and currently-enrolled students to learn software, techniques, and analysis methods. The added benefit of these courses is they can lead to software certification, transcripts are managed, certificates are provided, and some courses qualify for continuing education credits for professional certifications, such as Professional Engineers or Professional Geologists, or Licensed Surveyors.

For more information about the Murray State University/MARC ESRI Site License Agreement, please contact Michael Busby, the MSU/CPE Site License Administrator (SLA).

I. The HESLA allows for cooperation with non-profit organizations and collaboration with other public institutions as long as the results of the work do not result in any for-profit benefits. For example, engaging in "Memorandum of Agreement/Understanding" with Kentucky Fish & Wildlife for research and analysis of white-nose disease would be an acceptable contract. 

During the planning phase of any grant, contract, or MOA proposal, please contact the local SLA to ensure contract compliance.

Autodesk for Students and Educators

Many software companies provide software solutions for colleges and universities. Having some experience with these licenses I can say some companies "don't get it," charging hundreds of dollars to students for trial versions of software which expire after a year. Autodesk, by comparison, does get it.

3D printing and design, 3D scanning technology, and other DIY fabrication devices require software to generate the files used in fabrication. Colleges and universities, after spending money to acquire fabrication technology are often strapped for cash to obtain necessary software. Often, the software arriving with the technology is good, but not "industry-standard." Faculty want to expose students to current software provided by industry leaders.

Years ago, software companies might provided "low-cost" versions of their software to students for educational use. While "enterprise" licenses might cost tens of thousands of dollar "per seat" (per computer), a student license might run $500-$1,000. Students would scoff at such offering despite the 90% discount from list. Software companies, at the time, didn't really understand that if they simply gave their software to schools to use in teaching, the students would want to use the software after gaining the experience, resulting in a built-in user base.

Most companies are catching on to the idea of using colleges and universities to develop a ready-made user base and are literally giving away software, or are engaging in very generous licensing agreements which reduce the cost of yearly licensing to pennies per seat. Kudos to those companies, by the way.

Autodesk has such an offer to colleges and universities. Autodesk offers colleges and universities the chance to enroll in their Educational Community program. Once enrolled, nearly all of Autodesk'
s software is available to the entire campus community.

Just a sample of Autodesk's Educational Community offering

The Autodesk Educational Community allows disciplines across campus to offer instructional software, teach design and encourage creativity. Autodesk is not paying me for writing this post; over time I have used 3Ds Max, AutoCad, AutoCad Map, SketchBook Express. I know people who use Maya as often as I use my wok (a lot).

If your campus is into design, creativity, fabrication, then see if you already are part of the Educational Community. If not, make some noise and see if you can get your institution signed-up for this great offering by an industry leader in graphic arts and design.