After 20 years, Drexel University has finally replaced their archaic platform for downloading licensed software with OnTheHub. Students need no longer suffer through navigating Drexel’s unintuitive file system riddled with poorly labeled files and devoid of clear instruction. Now, academic software can be downloaded for free or heavily discounted prices with ease.
OnTheHub features a variety of extremely useful software for students of all majors and colleges. The most impressive of these is the Adobe Creative Cloud license, available to students for just $60 for an entire year, the cost per month for the license normally. This suite includes the full Creative Cloud suite, including but not limited to Photoshop, Illustrator, Adobe Premiere and Acrobat Pro. Also available at heavily discounted prices are NordVPN, Comptia A+ labs, EndNote 21 and AcePDF.
However, this discounted software comes with its own caveats. Most importantly, any discounted license purchased through OnTheHub expires immediately upon leaving Drexel. For example, if you were to graduate two months into a year-long subscription, you would lose access for the remaining months despite already paying for the full year.
It is also important to note that not all of the free and discounted software that comes as a perk of being a Drexel student is available on OnTheHub. Drexel students also have access to free licenses for otherwise expensive software such as Microsoft’s Office Suite (Powerpoint, Word, Excel, etc), Autodesk and 7-Zip. A full list of these softwares is available.
While Drexel’s move to OnTheHub is a large step in the right direction, it is still evident that Drexel needs to be doing more to benefit the student experience from a technical perspective. Lately, Drexel has been on a streak of updating their student-facing software, but has more often than not completely missed the forest through the trees. DegreeWorks recently got a new coat of paint it desperately needed, but it lost the clear indication of which classes were taken and which were not. In the process of making DegreeWorks mobile-friendly, they ironically made it harder to use.
OnTheHub features many discounted computing courses in programming and security, yet not common software like Zybooks and Pearson that are required for several classes. With tuition still climbing, why are students paying additional money to learn from a third-party software? The people in charge of maintaining these services like DegreeWorks, DrexelOne, and OnTheHub need to check in with the students these services are made for in the first place and start making student-focused, useful updates.