Education Program

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3. Community Relations
4. Education Program

On this page

• Overview
• Mission
  • Goals
• Vision
• What we are working on
• Key Performance Indicators
  • Number of educational institutions enrolled per quarter
  • Number of educational seats enrolled per quarter
• GitLab for Education Program Requirements
  • Students
  • Non-profits
• Resources for GitLab for Education Program Participants
  • How to structure your projects
• Internal Program Processes
  • Workflows for Processing Applications and Renewals
  • Metrics

Overview

At GitLab, we believe that every student can contribute! The GitLab for Education Program provides the top tiers of GitLab for free to students and faculty at educational institutions around the globe. We are invested in ensuring that students have access to the full functionality of GitLab while in school so they can become future contributors and evangelists of GitLab.

The GitLab for Education Program has exceeded our expectations on its own merit. As of January 2020 we reached over 740 educational institutions worldwide and have 1.4 million users.

Mission

The primary mission of the GitLab for Education Program is to facilitate and drive the adoption of GitLab at educational institutions around the globe and build an engaged community of GitLab evangelists and contributors in the next generation of the workforce.

Additionally, the Education Program seeks to evangelize the benefits of an all-remote operating model and GitLab's associated company values to the next generation of the workforce.

Goals

The goals in building out the Education Program are:

• Align the program structure and license offerings with the needs and operating models of educational institutions while providing the best GitLab has to offer to students, faculty, and staff.
• Grow the base of educational institutions, students, faculty, and staff using GitLab.
• Build a robust and engaged educational community full of members who collaborate, contribute, and enable each other to be successful with GitLab.
• Build meaningful relationships with the Education Program member institutions.
• Provide a wealth of resources for adopting GitLab in an educational setting including course materials, case studies, code examples, syllabi, and presentations.
• Evangelize the benefits of DevOps as a discipline and GitLab as the leading single application for the DevOps lifecycle.
• Bring DevOps into the classroom in related disciplines such as computer science and infrastructure technology.
• Be a thought leader in the discipline of DevOps by engaging with related academic disciplines, academic organizations, and associations.
• Evangelize the benefits of an all-remote operating model and GitLab's associated company values to the next generation of the workforce.

Vision

The vision of the GitLab for Education Program is to enable educational institutions to be successful in teaching, learning, conducting research with GitLab. We seek to build an engaged community of GitLab users around the world who actively contribute to GitLab and each other’s success, and ultimately become evangelists of GitLab in the workplace and beyond.

What we are working on

GitLab for Education Program issues typically exist in the Education Program subgroup of the Community Relations Group but they can also exist in Field Marketing, Corporate Marketing, or other marketing subgroups.

We use the education label to track issues. The Education Program issue board provides an overview of these issues and thier status. Any Epics that we are working on can be found in the Community Relations Group with the tag education.

We use Epic Boards in the Community Relations project to track our Education Program OKRs. All OKR Epics specific the Education Program have the 'education' tag.

Key Performance Indicators

Number of educational institutions enrolled per quarter

This KPI is defined as the total number of educational institutions that are issued an educational license per quarter.

At this time we are not tracking renewals but we are looking at improving data accuracy and will include renewals on a subsequent iteration.

Number of educational seats enrolled per quarter

This KPI is defined as the total number of seats issued for all educational licenses per quarter.

GitLab for Education Program Requirements

In order to qualify for the GitLab for Education Program the following criteria must be met:

• Be a qualified educational institution: A qualified educational institution is one that has been accredited by an authorized agency within its applicable local, state, provincial, federal, or national government and has the primary purpose of teaching its enrolled students. Qualified educational institutions can be public or private and must be non-profit/non-commercial.

• Meet the use case requirements: The GitLab educational license can be used solely for the purposes of instructional use or non-commercial academic research. Instructional use includes activities related to learning, training, research and development. Non-commercial academic research includes not-for-profit research projects that are not intended to nor produce results, works, services, or data for commercial use by anyone to generate revenue. The GitLab educational license cannot be used for commercial, professional, or any other for-profit purposes.

• Be a full-time faculty or staff member at the qualified educational institution: We can only issue licenses to full-time faculty or staff who are directly employed full-time at the educational institution. Students who may also be employed in a staff role cannot apply.

Please note that the decision to issue a GitLab education license is always at the discretion of GitLab. If you have questions on the application and decision making process, please reach out to education@gitlab.com.

Examples of educational institutions that qualify:

• K-12 institutions including Elementary, Middle, and High Schools
• Junior Colleges, Community Colleges, and Technical Schools
• Universities
• Research Institutes or Centers directly owned and operated by a University

Examples of entities that do not qualify:

• Training centers
• Churches and libraries
• Medical research centers or institutions associated with a hospital or health care system
• Independent research laboratories
• Re-Training programs
• Military schools, institutes, or training centers within a branch of the military
• Research institutes or National Laboratories that are owned by a Federal Government
• eLearning platforms not directly affiliated with or operated by an accredited academic University
• Coding academies, bootcamps, or independent learning platforms

Examples of acceptable use cases:

• Classroom use - all activities related to the instruction of students in the classroom
• Non-commercial academic research - activity related to not-for-profit research projects at an educational institution
• Organizational use - activity related to a club or organization at an educational institution as related to the development of students; this could include open source student clubs, robotic clubs, engineering clubs or the like. Note that the non-acceptable use cases still apply to clubs and organizations.

Examples of non-acceptable use cases:

• IT professional use - use for maintaining or running the infrastructure, technology or otherwise, of the institution
• Administrative use - use for any administrative functions of the institution including program management, planning, marketing, and service delivery
• Commerical research - research conducted by any commercial programs or entities operated by or affiliated with the educational institution for a commercial purpose

Students

At this time, GitLab does not issue licenses directly to students as part of the GitLab for Education Program. Students are welcome to encourage thier educational institution to apply to the program directly. Students can access a free subscription for GitLab.com or a free download of our core self-managed offering. Students can also apply for a 30-day trial if they would like to try out some more advanced features.

Non-profits

At this time, GitLab does not have a formal not-for-profit program. The primary reason is that the volume of applications to our current free programs takes up all of our bandwidth! We do generally see the value in non-profits and we hope to create some sort of a non-profit offering in the future.

1. To stay up-to-date, you can subscribe to the the non-profit issue by enabling notifications. To enable notifications, click the Notifications toggle in the sidebar to on.
2. You can contribute your feedback.

Any inbound request for a discounted or free license by a not-for-profit organization is handled on a case-by-case basis by the DRI (the appropriate sales team member for the geographic region of the non-profit and their manager). We cannot guarantee that non-profit requests will be granted as the decision is at the discretion of the DRI. Discounted or free licenses for non-profits are only issued in very rare cases. Because GitLab does not currently have a license and end-user license agreement (EULA) specifically for non-profits, we are not able to issue a license without additional support from our legal team in order to modify our existing EULA and license granting process.

Resources for GitLab for Education Program Participants

We are always looking for ways to better support our participants' use of GitLab for teaching, learning, and research. Please reach out to us at education@GitLab.com with any ideas.

How to structure your projects

We often receive questions about how to best manage your licenses. Here are a few tips:

• GitLab does not use a named license model. This means that seats are generic and not specific to a user. If a user leaves your organization, you can remove or block that user to free the seat. This seat can then be used by another user.
• Although we offer only one license key for the self-hosted solutions, this key can be used on multiple independent instances. This means you can run multiple separate servers with the same license key. The only caveat is that currently there isn't an easy way to calculate the total number of consumed seats across all instances.
• You can manage the visibility of your projects with GitLab groups. A member of the parent group automatically has access to all descendants. GitLab doesn't support having the subgroup be more restrictive than its parent. However, being a part of a subgroup does not grant you access to the parent group. The best way to organize your work is to make everyone a member of their respective subgroup having only admins in the organizational (top-level) group. [Learn more about GitLab groups].(https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/group/).
• Please also see our licensing and subscription FAQ section for more details.

Internal Program Processes

Workflows for Processing Applications and Renewals

All applications to our Education Program and renewal requests for education licenses are routed through our application workflow by the Community Advocates.

Metrics

The Education Program generates standard metrics for our KPIs and for general monitoring purposes. These metrics are reported in the Community Relations Group Conversation as well as for quarterly tracking.

The steps below will generate the Education Program metrics:

1. Log into SFDC.
2. Navigate to Reports.
3. Open the 'Education Opportunities Metrics' SFDC Report.
4. Click Run Report to generate the report.
5. Click Export Details. Choose Unicode (UTF-8) for the Export File Encoding and .csv for the Export File Format. Then click Export and save the file.
6. Download the Eduoss script.
7. Open a command prompt and change to the directory where you have the script and .csv file.
8. Run the Edoss script with the exported csv file as input to generate the final csv file. ./edoss.rb -i <exported_file>.csv -o <output_file>.csv
9. Update the GitLab for Education Graphs for the Community Relations Group Call by importing the results of the script and updating the figures. Notes:
   • You may need to make the file executable by using the following command: chmod 755 edoss.rb
     • Additionally, the processor script can provide the data in yaml and json formats.