Windows 11 Education for Students
Microsoft offers Windows 11 Education for free to students at certain educational institutions. UW students can access that software following the directions below.
- The Education edition has more features than the Home, Pro, and Pro Education editions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10_editions#Comparison_chart
- Microsoft will distribute only one Windows Education key to each student.
To receive your Windows student key, please follow these steps:
- Open a browser. Microsoft recommends that you use Private or Incognito mode.
- Go to https://signup.azure.com/studentverification?offerType=3
- On the sign-in page, use your netid@wisc.edu email address
- If this is the first time you have signed in to this site, you will need to complete these steps:
- You will be asked to agree to the terms and conditions and the Academic/Student verification
- For the Academic/Student verification, please fill in the fields. For school name, type in Madison and then select University of Wisconsin Madison (Madison, WI)
- For your school email address, please use your netid@wisc.edu email address.
- You will now be routed to the Education | Overview hub page. (NOTE: Pay attention to directions below, they differ slightly from the screenshot).
- To see the available software, please click on the 'Software' tab on the left side of the page.
- In the search box, type in 'Windows 11' (without the quotes).
- Select Windows 11 Education (NOTE: if you need Windows 10 Education, search for that instead. You will only get a key for one version of Windows but Windows 10 may be upgraded to Windows 11 in the future). You do NOT want the N version.
- Click on 'View key' to get your product key for the version of Windows you selected. We strongly recommend you also backup this key securely.
- Click on 'Download' to download the Windows installer