Upon admission to MIT, an @learner.manipal.edu email address is issued by the Institute to each student. This email address opens up a world of opportunities for students in terms of access to academic information and certain perks such as price reductions on services. From exclusive student discounts on music streaming applications such as Apple Music to free membership for handy software like Grammarly Premium, the @learner.manipal.edu ID is indeed a helpful tool in a college student’s learning arsenal. This article provides a guide to accessing the @learner.manipal.edu ID and lists some of the services that can be availed using it.

Accessing the @learner.manipal.edu ID

Until 2018, an email was sent out to first-year students by the Institute (to the email address provided during admission), containing the details of the Microsoft Office 365 account that is administered by MAHE. This included the email address itself, a temporary password, and information about Office 365 and the other productivity tools that can be availed through the account.

However, from 2019 onwards, the @learner.manipal.edu email address, as well as the temporary password issued by the Institute, will be displayed directly on the SLcM and SIS Portals of the new admittees.

In case a student does not have the mail or is unable to access their account, an email can be sent to mailadmin@learner.manipal.edu with personal details such as the name, registration number, date of birth, branch, and college to request for the email address and temporary password or answers to any other queries.

The Perks of a .edu Email Address

Most companies often look to incentivise product usage by offering discounts and deals specifically to students. Registering for services using a .edu email address is used as a simple method to confirm a customer’s student status. The following list, while not exhaustive, provides information about some of the applications that can be used through a .edu email address.

Microsoft Office 365

An individual Microsoft Office 365 subscription can cost up to INR 4,199.00 per year. However, students of an accredited university can access it for free. In addition to the core Office tools such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, other productivity tools like SharePoint, Sway, Yammer, and Forms can be made use of. Additional storage of 1 TB on OneDrive is also another feature. The following link can be used to directly log in to the institutional Office 365 account — https://portal.office.com/.

Grammarly Premium

The institute offers a free Grammarly Premium membership to students for the duration of their course, which can be availed by registering through the learner.manipal.edu email ID. Grammarly Premium can prove to be a life-saver when it comes to checking spelling and grammar, especially to ensure good quality in a report, academic paper or a curriculum vitae. Settings can be modified to suit the type of writing (academic, creative, etc.), and it also offers suggestions related to sentence structure and vocabulary. Another interesting feature is the ‘plagiarism check’, which identifies the sections of your writing that are plagiarised, and even lists the source from which the text has been copied. 

To create a free Grammarly Premium account, students must sign up using the learner.manipal.edu email address from this link. Once the sign up is complete, an email will be sent to the institutional email ID. Students can use the Grammarly Editor to edit documents and correct errors quickly. The Microsoft Office and browser plugins, as well as the Grammarly keyboard, can also come in handy.

Apple Music Student Subscription

College life is incomplete without a playlist to suit every mood and occasion. Those who use Apple Music through their mobile devices or iTunes can make use of the student subscription, which costs INR 49 per month following a three-month free trial period. The student subscription option can be used for four years or the duration of your stay in the institute. The student validation service, UNiDAYS is used to confirm the student status using the .edu email address. More details about how to get a student subscription can be found through this link.

Spotify Premium for Students

Students are eligible to get a yearly discount of 50% on the popular music streaming service Spotify Premium. The price for students is INR 59 per month following a three-month free trial period. This subscription can be renewed every 12 months up to three times. A user’s student status is verified through a third-party service known as SheerID. While this does not require the .edu ID, they must submit an official document that proves their enrollment in the college and displays their name, the university name, and an issue date from the current academic term. The process to avail the student discount can be found through the following link.

ResearchGate

ResearchGate is like a social networking site for researchers to share their projects and research, discuss questions and collaborate. As students of a university, this may help those interested in research to keep abreast of current work that is being carried out in their department or institute and follow discussions related to their research interest.  

Reading articles on ReaserchGate does not require an account. However, those who wish to become members need to have an email address at a recognised institution to sign up. Students can sign up easily through this link using their .edu email address. 

GitHub Student Developer Pack

GitHub student members can apply for the Student Developer Pack, which provides them with free access or discounts for a variety of developer tools. Among the benefits are bonus credits for the AWS Educate program, a free Hobby Dyno on Heroku, a free license on JetBrains, and credits on Microsoft Azure and Digital Ocean.

After signing in to their GitHub account, and verifying their student status using the .edu email address, students are sent an email that confirms their access to the Student Developer Pack. The offers can be availed through unique links, coupon codes, GitHub login or direct login. Students can view the benefits that are up for offer as well as sign up for the Student Developer Pack through this link.

Prezi

Prezi is a powerful software which can be used to make beautiful, creative presentations. In contrast to the traditional slides used in presentations, Prezi features an overview of the presentation and zooming in and panning out options by which the individual topics can be viewed. There is a free Basic plan that allows access to the primary tools, and paid plans that support a host of other features. The Plus plan will enable users to convert PowerPoint presentations to Prezis, control privacy, and export presentations to PDF, among other benefits.

The EDU Plus plan costs $5 per month (billed annually), as compared to the Individual Plus plan, which costs $15 per month. Students can avail this discount following a free trial period by signing up for an account and verifying their student status using the .edu email ID.

Amazon Prime Student

Amazon.com offers an exclusive Prime membership for college students, which enables them to a six-month free trial period and a discounted price of $59 per year after that. Students are verified using the .edu email ID and can avail the benefits of Prime Student until they graduate or for four years (whichever comes first).

Prime Student offers unlimited movie and TV show streaming, unlimited photo storage on Prime Photos and unlimited reading through Prime Reading. However, Prime Reading and Prime Music services cannot be used during the trial period. Students who have an Amazon account can submit the sign-up form and verify their student status to start using Prime Student.  It must be noted that since Prime membership is dependent on geographical location, Prime Student is only valid on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk, and not on amazon.in.

Notion

Notion.so is an all in one workspace that provides components such as databases, calendars, kanban boards, wikis, and reminders. This allows users to plan, collaborate, and organise tasks or projects.  Notion provides the building blocks and users can create their own layout to get work done more efficiently. It is available on Andriod, iOS, and Web.

Students can avail the free Personal Pro plan for individual worth $4, for free using their learner ID. To do so, students need to sign up with their learner ID and verify it with a code send via the email ID. Once signed up, students will be given an option at the bottom of the sidebar to upgrade to the Personal Pro plan free of charge.

Described as a Chrome Extension which aims to fulfill the average user’s curiosity by predicting relevant information from a media file, ‘Flico’ is the first product by Flicksys Inc., a startup launched by five students of MIT. The app has four modules –  Words, Landmarks and the yet unreleased, E-Commerce and Music modules, with the Landmarks feature being the most popular.

In case the user wishes to identify the location of a certain landmark in a movie, or any YouTube video for that matter, Flico identifies and presents the landmark along with its location on Google Maps, even displaying nearby restaurants. Flico has processed around seven thousand requests and the downloads stand at four thousand and counting.  The extension was featured on Product Hunt’s website, Hatchley’s newsletter and also on the Chrome WebStore. Due to these admirable feats, the team doesn’t require to spend time and resources on Public Relations.

The team behind Flico, the winners of AngelHack Manipal, comprises Yash Goel, the founder, and co-founders, Kartik Arora, Anirudh Raghunath, Rahil Patel and Amrit Ayyar. Theirs is one of those best performing teams which has been invited to pitch at the Global Demo Day to be held in November at Silicon Valley in the USA. The event will be attended by a large number of investors and is a huge opportunity for the expansion of their venture. 

With the vision of extracting maximum information from any media file, the students started working towards making a product that would serve exactly that. A discussion with Mr. Kartik Mandaville, the founder of ‘Springrole’ and an alumnus of MIT, Manipal, provided the initial validation that the students required to start with the implementation of their idea, and on insistence of Mr. Mandaville, they participated in AngelHack. This of course proved to be central to the development of their product.

One of the many perks of acing AngelHack was provision of strategic mentoring so that the team could evolve the unfinished product into an actual startup. Technical support was generously provided. From then on, the team got incubated in Silicon Valley with AngelHack as their incubator. Weekly interactive web conferences with chosen experts accelerated the process. The three month long incubation process will culminate with the Global Demo Day, which will be held in November.

The team received immense help from another alumnus of MIT, Dr. Arun Shanbhag, who was a professor at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School. Dr. Shanbhag is also the Chief Innovation Officer at MUTBI. The advisory board comprises Dr. Shanbhag, Mr. Radhesh Kanumury, the country lead of IBM India, and Mr. Kartik Mandaville, founder of SpringRole. IBM has invested $25,000 into the venture and is officially the back end partner, hence the upgrades required due to the surging traffic are covered.

The Global Demo Day will ring in the next step for the team. It could be a more mature incubator, an acquisition, or any sort of funding. When it comes to the trip to Silicon Valley for the event, the university has supported the team and they have not faced problems in acquiring permissions. The team has taken the crowd funding approach to fund the trip and has raised around Rs. 2 lakhs so far.

The next module of ‘Flico’ which the team plans to release is the E-Commerce module. The founder, Yash Goel, acknowledges that developing a functional music module is one of the challenges that the team plans to focus on and will be something to look out for. It will be very interesting to see how the future rolls out for Flico, and their company, Flicksys Inc.