I prefer to think it’s mostly the first, although I am sure certain cases of the second exist. If they do not do that, either they are ignorant, or they are simply not concerned with the financial welfare of their less well-to-do students. If they require their students to use a particular software for their projects/classes, they also need to provide some reasonable means of access to that software for all concerned - regardless of their economic status. This puts the ball squarely in the court of the school and department administrators. And as time goes on, the school continues to buy upgrades with version changes, the cost is cheaper and cheaper per annum. Peanuts.Įven if the school buys enough lab licenses so that all 1000 students have access to Rhino 24/7 and those costs triple - it’s still peanuts. And that is over six years, so the cost to the school is less than $3 (€) per student per year. If there are 1000 people who had continuous access to Rhino over that time period, the cost to the school per student is… a little over $16 (€). Yes, that looks like a rather large outlay, but let’s consider the cost per student.

The initial cost to the school is about $11K (€), plus perhaps two version upgrades at about $2800 (€) each, total $16,660 (€). That means up to 330 of the 1000 students can use Rhino simultaneously. The school buys 11 Rhino lab licenses with 30 seats each and puts them in a Cloud Zoo account they then allow any student in the university or department domain to access them. Total of 1600 ‘potential users’ over that entire time period, with 1000 at any given moment. If the case study extends over a 6-year period (the time it takes most architecture students to get their degree and graduate), there may be two Rhino version updates in that time period, plus 600 students will have graduated and 600 new students will have come in. Let’s also assume that 100 of the students graduate every year and are replaced by new incoming ones.

Say a school has 1000 students who may need to use Rhino for their projects and that perhaps 1/3 of them might be needing to use Rhino simultaneously.

This is a highly interesting possibility which unfortunately many institutions are completely unaware of. Since Rhino V6, the Cloud Zoo allows schools to share their lab licenses with individual students.

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