Improvements to our support for Educators

[ASayre]

Educators are a critical part of our community. While we are working on a program to provide credits to students and non-profits, we want to be more inclusive of the folks who are helping, guiding and teaching these students.

We are actively researching and shaping a long term solution.

We would love to hear more of your feedback and perspective on how we can help support the educational community. Education comes in all types, for wide ranges of students and educators/teachers/professors.

What would you like to see in support of this community? What do you see as needed?

Edit Nov 9th, 2022: We have a student program live in coordination with the GitHub Students pack, more info: https://blog.heroku.com/github-student-developer-program

[davetron5000]

Hey, author of a few books here, namely Rails, Angular, Postgres, and Bootstrap as well as a few past editions of Agile Web Development w/ Rails. Whenever there is a need to either spin up a postgres or host an app temporarily to explain something, Heroku has been my go to because it is free, extremely simple to get going, and allows the reader to maintain focus on the topic of the book instead of configuring infrastructure. This is particularly helpful for newcomers who may not be comfortable setting up infrastructure on their personal computer and especially for Windows users, since most stuff in Ruby land assumes you have a Mac.

TBH, if the free tier was even more limited, like a few hours per day max, it would likely meet the needs for people reading technical books or following technical tutorials.

[mhartl]

I’ve been using Heroku literally from the start (I was in the same Y Combinator batch as the Heroku founders in 2008) and have been using it in the Ruby on Rails Tutorial since 2010. (Both railstutorial.org and learnenough.com also run on Heroku.) Given that, at the time of its launch, the entire Rails Tutorial was available for free online, I would probably not have used Heroku if there hadn’t been a free tier. Even now, the first several chapters of the book are free, and the full tutorial is available for free via scholarship, so having a free tier is still extremely valuable. Especially given the large number of international readers, many of whom don’t have credit cards, being able to get started without having to pay is a critical part of the tutorial.

I’m sure that Heroku’s free tier comes with lots of costs, and it’s understandable to want to minimize them. My own experience with the Learn Enough Scholarship program suggests that introducing even a little friction can dramatically improve the signal-to-noise ratio in such cases. I’m hopeful that Heroku can figure out a way to minimize the costs while preserving a free tier for educational and other purposes.

[fiveNinePlusR]

There's also people that are going through self taught programs like the odin project that will be negatively impacted by this development. There are quite a few people that might not have access to a credit card number to easily signup with as there are a lot of international students. Having to have an edu email or some other accredited establishment is a burden for those people.

Like davetron5000 said... having it be able to handle traffic for a few hours a day or severely CPU limited for testing purposes would probably be sufficient.

[andreimaxim]

I've been involved in several Ruby/Ruby on Rails teaching classes a while back and there's a huge benefit for the community when it comes to deploying Ruby on Rails applications on Heroku. It's really hard to put in words the joy people have when they see that their work is published online and only several days ago they barely understood how a computer works.

It would be amazing if Heroku could keep a free plan that didn't require a credit card.

Thinking of friction, like @mhartl suggested, I think it would be fine if any of the free plan apps would work for only 60 days without the possibility of adding a domain and then force you to upgrade to paid eco dynos and mini Postgres plans as most classes aren't that long. Sure, some accounts might create a new app from scratch and redeploy the code, but doing that work and the new domain URL should be enough to significantly limit the abuse.

[w0244079]

I'm teaching at a Community College in Canada and I've been using Heroku with my classes for a number of years now.

The free dynos option was perfect for what both students and educators needed to expose new developers to the challenges of deploying and hosting various types of applications. Heroku was, and is, great!

I echo those above who are expressing some form of free tier without credit card for education purposes. I would in fact say that continuting the current free dyno offering would be perfect and Heroku could simply limit access to accounts that are tied to an approved institution. A similar model is done by the great folks at JetBrains where institutions can register and as long as students and teachers request through their school-sanctioned email. Students and teachers get access to all of their software for a 12-month period. Teachers like myself would have to be able to perpetually renew their access as they don't get to graduate. :)

Here's JetBrains' offering... https://www.jetbrains.com/community/education/#students

Thanks for being serious about this. I realize that your resources are limited and the reasons the free tier was cancelled was due to wide access. Limiting the access to qualifying institutions would work beautifully in my view.

Michael Caines Nova Scotia Community College

[allefeld]

I am teaching not software development, but statistical data analysis. I have developed a small Python app intended to simulate the process of data collection, to bring statistics teaching a little bit closer to actual practice. Educators or students can select simulation parameters, students download "collected" data and analyze them as an exercise.

The project is still in its infancy, and it may even turn out not to be useful. The code is here: https://github.com/allefeld/tykhe. I'm currently starting to use it with students in one course, and intend to add more simulated "studies" over time.

Because in this exploring phase users number in the dozens, each of them sending maybe 10 requests per week during only a few months of the year, and each request takes at most a few hundred milliseconds, the free tier of Heroku seemed ideal to deploy it: https://tykhe.herokuapp.com/

If it turns out to be a good idea, I may be able to secure funding from my university, but it's not ready for that yet. Loosing the Heroku free tier is therefore a problem for me. And $7 per month seems a bit much considering the currently very small scale of the project.

– Though I'm not entirely sure I understand the "Hobby" tier correctly. ~$0.01 per hour is completely fine assuming the numbers above (yearly cost of a few dollars). But if the app never sleeps, wouldn't I always get up to ~$7 per month? Unless I manually deactivate it. Therefore, "Hobby" tier with optional sleeping would be good for me.

[markreha]

I am a Professor at a major U.S. university. As part of a Cloud Computing course in the Program that I am a Chair for and also teach courses in I teach students Heroku, Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud (along with other cloud related topics like DevOps etc.). We have been using Heroku for the past 7 years. Students love working with Heroku. Our university has a special free subscription setup with Microsoft to enable students to access basic Azure services for App and Databases all without requiring a credit card. AWS has the 12 month free tier. Google also has a credit based subscription that allows students to explore Google Cloud during the semester long class. I have no idea how long your current Heroku GitHub credit based subscription would last in a semester long course where students deploy a couple of Spring Boot/MySQL apps. It would be a shame if we can no longer reasonably use Heroku in our Cloud Computing class.

[cordeiro]

Requiring a credit/debit card for students is really a major problem for international students. As a teacher, I cannot enforce any tool that creates recurrent costs for the students (like the credit card/banks fees) nor do I want to put the student at risk of having an unintentional cost that can become much, much large due to the exchange rates and foreign transaction fees.

Please give students an option that do not require using a credit card.

[pauloewerton]

I'm teaching web programming at a public college in Northeast Brazil and, as a public institution, all of our work and infrastructure are offered free of charge to students. I've been using Heroku as the go-to deployment platform for academic projects, teaching how to use it in most of my classes. The reasons I choose Heroku are its simplicity (specially the CLI) and, of course, the free plans that allowed my students and I to test our ideas, based on educational purposes only projects.

If I could suggest a new Heroku pricing model for educators and students, I would echo the words of one the fellow educators who contributed in this thread informing about the JetBrains pricing model, i.e., offering a free plan as long as both student and educators have access to their institutional e-mail addresses. That would suffice as proof of their condition as affiliated to an educational institution.

[w0244079]

Hi again,

I just read up on the makeshift program announced with Github and while I appreciate that Heroku is working on a future solution, I just wanted to state that it would be impossible for me to use the Github program with my courses due simply to the fact that a credit card is required to enroll in the program. I hope this can be changed with a future program rollout.

Michael Caines Nova Scotia Community College

[kvlinden]

In addition to the points made above by other educators, I'd add that choosing to announce this change in late August, just before the US academic year starts, and to shut the free tier down on November 28, just before the end of the semester in most US universities, were poor choices. Pushing the shutdown date back to the end of December or, perhaps better, the end of the academic year, would help ease the transition.

[erdogmush]

Hi, thanks for looking into long-term solutions to support education. I am a prof teaching a graduate program in software engineering. We had been using Heroku for many years in our courses to support student projects. We stopped this semester with the disappearance of the free tier, and switched to another provider with a free tier. It caused a lot of anxiety and disappointment. We'd love to come back to Heroku. However the current stopgap measure with Github, which requires a credit/debit card, is a non-starter for us. For several reasons, we really cannot force our students to provide billing information for a class/academic project. A more viable solution would be to associate the free tier with a verified Github educational organization, which are used only for classroom and academic purposes. Many other tool vendors use this method with us to make their free tiers available to our students: no billing info, and no student-level registration required. Thanks for listening.

As an aside, +1 for Kvlinden's comment about stopping the free tier in the middle of the semester, causing us to scramble to find viable alternatives.

[claraj]

Will educators be able to receive any free credit? I have a number of services running at Heroku that I use in my classroom and I'd like to keep those running if possible. I tried following the GitHub student link, but it already has me listed as an educator so I didn't see any way to claim credits. Thank you.

[olvegam]

I work at the Universidad de los Llanos in Villavicencio, Colombia; together with my colleagues, we use Heroku to teach Software Engineering, which is essential to deliver the complete development cycle with deployment. Of course, Heroku is the best, we ask that the free layer continues with identifying students and teachers through their institutional mail. Our domain is unillanos.edu.co and so it should have all educational institutions. Additionally, and no less importantly, it is essential for non-profit organizations to have the support of initiatives like this one. In this case, a limitation in space or time of use can be added.

[erdogmush]

+1 for Olga's post. So far, Heroku has proven better than other alternatives for us. Having a free tier through a verified educational subdomain would be ideal.

I work at the Universidad de los Llanos in Villavicencio, Colombia; together with my colleagues, we use Heroku to teach Software Engineering, which is essential to deliver the complete development cycle with deployment. Of course, Heroku is the best, we ask that the free layer continues with identifying students and teachers through their institutional mail. Our domain is unillanos.edu.co and so it should have all educational institutions. Additionally, and no less importantly, it is essential for non-profit organizations to have the support of initiatives like this one. In this case, a limitation in space or time of use can be added.

[john-french]

I teach Software Engineering at Atlantic Technological University in Ireland, and I'm part of a community of instructors around the world who teach this subject based on an agile/saas-focused curriculum developed by Armando Fox and his colleagues at Berkeley.

Heroku's free tier has been a core part of teaching this subject in a modern way. The ability to easily deploy an app to the cloud in a real-world environment has given our students invaluable exposure to cloud and SaaS development, not to mention the motivation boost of seeing their app "out there" on the real internet. Also, students see the value of Heroku and can continue to explore it in their future projects and work.

Our institute is a free, publicly-funded college with a significant cohort of students from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds where access to credit cards is by no means universal and where asking students to sign up to services for their studies which require credit cards is a non-runner for a variety of other reasons too.

If Heroku needs to withdraw their free tier for some business reasons then fair enough, but please continue to support the modest requirements of educational and non-profit users.

This really needs to be done before the free tier is withdrawn, otherwise a community of Heroku users and advocates are going to be left in the lurch.

[capeterson]

We’ve officially launched a partnership with GitHub’s student developer program that makes Heroku credits available for free to qualifying students. The $13/mo allowance is designed to allow a subscription to the Eco dynos package as well as one instance each of mini tier Heroku Postgres and Heroku Data for Redis®

More information on how to sign up and the details are on the Heroku blog post announcing the program: https://blog.heroku.com/github-student-developer-program

@JorDaneeKey when you're back in the office can you make sure I didn't miss anything?

[claraj]

5. After submitting billing and credit card information, your platform credits will be applied monthly per the program terms ($13/mo for 12 months*).

....

*After 12 months, accounts will be charged for active services or they must spin down their resources to avoid charges.

After 12 months, I'd recommend shutting down these services.

Let's say a student is in their last semester, they have some Heroku apps running, maybe some final projects, the professor needs them to keep the services running for a time so they can grade them. Semester ends, time to forget about school for a while, maybe the student graduates, time goes by, other things to do, student doesn't spin down their servers.

If students graduate, they remember that they need to shut down their servers or start seeing charges on their statements, but have forgotten their Heroku password (or, let's say, there's a data breach and everyone needs to reset their account password.) After graduation, they've probably lost access to their .edu email account, then how will they get access to their Heroku accounts to shut down those servers? Now they are stuck with charges unless they cancel the charges with their bank.

In addition to the numerous comments here and in #18 credit cards are a barrier to many students, and for those who would be able to use a credit card, the policy of charging for services after the free credits is going to be a nasty surprise for students.

I've been using Heroku for about 7 years and I've really enjoyed teaching students about the platform, it's a great tool and we've got a lot of graduates who are Heroku fans. Other cloud platforms have a no-credit-card-required student program and I've spent the last month re-writing my cloud-based assignments with a different platform that all my students will be able to access. If the Heroku student program was no credit card, and no surprise fees, I'd be very happy to bring Heroku back to my classroom.

[erdogmush]

@capeterson Yes, we know, we have been discussion this new program in this thread, and have been saying: it doesn't do the job because requiring students to enter a credit card in a course setting is highly problematic, and impossible in some situations. If Heroku is to be used in CS classes in education, this really won't do. I am sensing some tone deafness.

[mikima]

Hello, I'm a design teacher in an Italian public university, i just discovered the new program and unfortunately I won't be able to use Heroku with the students since of course I cannot force them to have a credit card and use it for the course. I can understand your choice, and I thank you for the service you provided up to now. But if you really want to involvement of teachers and students you must remove this barrier. I agree with the others and suggest to consider even more limited tiers linked to academic verification, as other platforms do

[jritterbush]

I also think it is worth spending time talking about what defines "educators" and "students" here. As @fiveNinePlusR pointed out the Github program is focused on accredited universities:

• Be currently enrolled in a degree or diploma granting course of study such as a high school, secondary school, college, university, homeschool, or similar educational institution.
• Have a verifiable school-issued email address or upload documents that prove your current student status

I got into this field by learning from the work of people like @mhartl. I was not in school for that and did not have the money to spend on hosting plans to learn Rails or the other languages/frameworks that I needed to grow and apply for jobs. I worked hard, nights and weekends, around a job I did not enjoy so I could become a developer. It is incredibly rewarding as a new developer to understand how close you are to launching a site/app online with a small config file and a few commands. That access was a game-changer to me as a self-taught student guided by educators. Heroku's developer experience opened my eyes to what it could be.

I also want to add to what @claraj said about the 12-month limit, in addition to surprise costs, the problem with that is it assumes we finish learning. I am constantly learning new things and trying new stacks and tools out. In the little teaching I have done in my life, I emphasize the importance of being a lifelong learner and playing with new tools as often as you can to aid that.

One of the amazing things about our field is the diversity of students that can enter into it without a barrier of cost. Blocking access to that diverse avenue of entry with credit cards and overly-rigid definitions of "students/educators" (in this case defined by Microsoft and Salesforce) is sad and will ultimately be a detriment to the field.

As everyone noted above, I understand that this is a security vector you have to consider. However considering the solutions offered above (time limits being a good one) could keep a healthy stream of new, curious students joining the field. Maybe they will go to an accredited college eventually, but at first let them explore and discover without financial limits set on them.

[allefeld]

If it turns out to be a good idea, I may be able to secure funding from my university, but it's not ready for that yet. Loosing the Heroku free tier is therefore a problem for me. And $7 per month seems a bit much considering the currently very small scale of the project.

– Though I'm not entirely sure I understand the "Hobby" tier correctly. ~$0.01 per hour is completely fine assuming the numbers above (yearly cost of a few dollars). But if the app never sleeps, wouldn't I always get up to ~$7 per month? Unless I manually deactivate it. Therefore, "Hobby" tier with optional sleeping would be good for me.

Okay, now we have the new "Eco" tier, which is a flatrate with sleeping, which reduces the cost to $5 per month. Better, but still hard to justify for my very-small-scale needs. The sleeping means that dyno hours are preserved, but if I don't use those hours otherwise I don't actually save money from sleeping.

I'd still prefer "Hobby"/"Basic" with optional sleeping, because without that I only save money if I deactivate my app manually (and then reactivate etc.). Moreover, my app has been automatically converted to "Eco", but there doesn't seem to be a way to convert to "Basic".

And, the Pricing page doesn't work anymore.

[ASayre]

We know that we've been a bit silent on this one - know that we are still exploring ways to continue to make our support better for educations.

[AlexStormwood]

Hi Heroku team, I've been an educator teaching web development for roughly 8 years now. Heroku is straight-up the simplest deployment platform for any classroom-scale usage of the server stacks that we teach, but it's a consistent pain for us as educators because we have to re-argue for budget and expenses every year since the free Heroku tier disappeared.

Our students can get credits via the GitHub Education Pack and that's great. We're also covered by the GitHub Education Pack as teachers but Heroku remains a budgetary hassle for us.

Can you tell us a bit more about what is being explored for educator support in Heroku? Credits - the same system that our students can already use - is really all we need. Like, this cannot be understated -- keeping our teaching materials & access as similar as possible to what our students can see & do is one of the biggest, most important things in making education work.

Is the discussion stuck on "how do we verify and who do we allow?" Or "what benefits should we give out to educators?" Or something else?