What options do I have for my college professors who want to use Azure in their classroom?

A university in the southwest wanted to leverage Azure in their classroom for some of their advanced courses. What options do they have for using Azure in the classroom?

 

We developed the Azure grant for educators program where you can apply for an Educator Grant here to help leverage Azure to help with your class curricula. See here for details on the program.

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What are the requirements to be eligible for the Educator Grant program?

The requirements to be eligible are:

  • Requester must be a faculty member of an accredited university
  • Teaching an advanced course where Azure would be incorporated into the curricula (e.g. Computer Science, Engineering, Big Data, Modeling, Data Science, Machine learning, Biology, Chemistry, Genomics, etc.)
  • Passes must be used for a specific class
    1. Multiple classes should have multiple requests
    2. Multiple sections of same class may use one request
  • Passes must be used by students
  • Faculty must provide all information requested
    1. If you are unable to provide any of the requests, please attach a document explaining reason for omission, and another method to verify,

 

What Azure benefits do I receive if an educator qualifies for the Educator Grant for each class?

  • Faculty will receive a 12 month Azure subscription which is capped at $250/month account
  • Students will receive a 6 month Azure subscription which is capped at $100/month account

 

What are some ways to control Azure monthly costs for my classroom or students labs?

There is a new feature that was just released called Azure DevTest labs which can help control classroom lab costs by having options like auto-shutdown of VMs and limit VMs sizes to keep monthly Azure compute costs down. See my other post on Azure DevTest labs here.

 

What are some other student programs I should be aware of?

 

Is there an Azure grant program for university research?

Yes, see below: