Respondus licensing is the set of terms under which Respondus, Inc. sells assessment software to educational institutions. The company says it develops assessment applications for the education, training and certification markets and has partnered with universities, K-12 districts and assessment vendors for over 20 years.[14] Its marks LockDown Browser, Respondus Monitor, StudyMate and Respondus are registered trademarks of Respondus, Inc.[13] The commercial products are LockDown Browser, a custom browser that locks down the exam environment inside a learning management system (LMS); Respondus Monitor, an automated proctoring service that builds on LockDown Browser; Respondus 4, a Windows exam authoring tool; and StudyMate Campus, a service for flash cards and learning games. A fifth route, the SDK Edition of LockDown Browser, is licensed to technology partners.[1][11]
The model differs from most enterprise software. Respondus does not count installations, devices or named users. It sells one annual licence to an institution and prices it by the size of the institution: total student full-time equivalent (FTE) as reported by IPEDS for higher education, or the number of seats licensed in the institution’s LMS for K-12.[1][2] The principal exception is Respondus Monitor, which can be sold by seat, where a seat is one student in one course.[3]
Editions
The products are not sold in good, better, best editions. Each has an audience variant and, for some, a licensing option.
| Product | Higher education | K-12 | Deeper article |
|---|---|---|---|
| LockDown Browser | Campus-wide licence by Student FTE, USD 3,295 to 8,045 a year in published tiers[1] | Site licence by LMS seats, bundled with StudyMate Campus[2] | LockDown Browser licensing |
| Respondus Monitor | USD 4950 flat for the first term, then tiered seats, unlimited, or student purchase[3] | Not listed among the K-12 products[2] | Respondus Monitor licensing |
| Respondus 4 | Single user or campus-wide licence, USD 1,695 to 2,945 a year in published tiers[4] | Single user or site licence, USD 1,695 to 2,945 a year in published tiers[18] | Respondus 4, StudyMate and Test Bank Network licensing |
| StudyMate Campus | Campus-wide licence, USD 2,795 to 6,795 a year in published tiers[5] | Site licence bundled with LockDown Browser[2] | same |
| LockDown Browser SDK Edition | Licensed to companies integrating the browser with their own platforms[11] | same | LockDown Browser licensing |
Metrics
Three units matter. The first is Student FTE for higher education: the LockDown Browser agreement says the annual fees are based on the student Full-Time Equivalency at the institution as reported by IPEDS, and for institutions outside the United States on total student annual enrollment, subject to audit by Respondus.[6] The second is the LMS seat licence for K-12, which the K-12 agreement uses as the fee basis.[8] The third is the Respondus Monitor seat, defined as one student per course where Respondus Monitor is used.[3] See Student FTE, LMS seat licence and Respondus Monitor seat.
Two further units apply at the edges. A Respondus Monitor student subscription is a USD 15, 12-month licence a student buys for all courses at one institution.[3] A Respondus 4 single user licence is bought online by an individual instructor.[4]
Counting / floors
The licence is not metered by use. A campus-wide LockDown Browser licence gives unlimited use at the institution, and Respondus 4 and StudyMate Campus campus-wide licences likewise cover all faculty (and, for StudyMate, students).[1][4][5] The institution reports its Student FTE, or LMS seat count, on the ordering form of the agreement; K-12 buyers whose LMS includes students in grades K-4 are asked for a separate breakout of seats for grades 5-12.[2]
Floors are the first tier of each price list. LockDown Browser and StudyMate Campus start at 1 to 2,000 students, Respondus 4 at under 2,500 students, and institutions over 40,000 students are quoted individually.[1][4][5] The Respondus Monitor first term has a fixed fee of USD 4950, whatever the size of the institution.[3]
Virtualization & partitioning
None of the institutional agreements addresses virtual machines, partitioning or processors. The licence attaches to the institution and its Affiliates, defined as current employees, instructors and students (teaching assistants in the Respondus 4 agreement), not to hardware.[6][7] The end-user agreement for LockDown Browser prohibits using it with applications designed to bypass the locked browser environment, and says it is intended only for use with a properly licensed third-party LMS.[10]
Cloud / BYOL
Respondus Monitor is described as a cloud-based service plus software.[9] There is no bring-your-own-licence mechanism or cloud-provider variant in the public documents. LockDown Browser and Respondus Monitor are enabled inside the institution’s own LMS, so the LMS administrator is the practical licence contact; the agreements name an administrator contact and two Authorized Support Persons on the ordering form.[6]
Programs
- Free two-month pilot. Institutions may use LockDown Browser and Respondus Monitor for two months without further obligation, but use beyond that binds them to the minimum term.[6]
- 200 included Respondus Monitor seats with each annual LockDown Browser licence.[6]
- K-12 bundle. K-12 schools get StudyMate Campus with LockDown Browser as a “Buy One, Get One Free” suite.[2]
- Test Bank Network. Instructors who adopt participating textbooks can use publisher test banks at no extra cost with a licensed Respondus 4.0 or Respondus LE.[12]
- SDK licensing for companies that embed LockDown Browser in their own assessment platforms.[11]
Terms, renewal and exit
All three institution agreements run by academic year starting August 1 (a January 1 start, or another date agreed in writing, is an option) and renew automatically unless the institution says in writing that it will discontinue.[6][7][8] Renewal is at Respondus’s then current pricing and terms, with a 60-day notice before an annual fee change.[6] A licensee that ends the agreement early gets no refund or proration.[6] The agreements article compares them clause by clause.
Audits and compliance
The public agreements contain no software-asset audit clause of the kind found in enterprise contracts. The one audit reference is that the enrollment figure used by institutions outside the United States is “subject to audit by Licensor”.[6] The licence-management signals are structural: Respondus permits SDK Partners to license, embed and distribute LockDown Browser and may receive anonymized data from them for intellectual property protection and licence management purposes.[17] A practical compliance check for an institution is therefore to confirm that the FTE or seat figure on the signed order form matches the current tier, and that the Respondus Monitor seat usage shown in the administrator area stays inside the purchased tier.[3]
Out of scope
This overview does not cover the privacy, biometric or accessibility practices of Respondus products, the content of publisher test banks (which remain publisher property), or the learning management systems the products integrate with, whose own licences are separate.[12][15] It does not cover reseller pricing, which the price pages say may differ from North American list prices.[1]