I spoke to someone vaguely connected to MSFT about all of this, and he brought up a point that I hadn't thought of but that explains a lot of MSFT's choices in this matter. Anything that involves kids and user accounts is regulated to all hell, and companies that avoid legal requirements end up with 100+million dollar fines, as YouTube did. A responsible teacher or parent must have part ownership and presumed supervision of the kids' account and activities. Unless Trump and Congress is organized enough to pass emergency legislation indemnifying MSFT now and forever, the requirement that's in place will remain.

Unfortunately this doesn't seem to work with the best features of Minecraft Educational Edition. I just tried this. You can't load the Education Edition Worlds, at least on the Win10 Bedrock edition. The feature to enable cheats is there, as is the option to enable "education edition", but I think all it's doing is enabling some of the features and physics of the Chemistry pack.

Attempting to install the Education Edition worlds available at https://education.minecraft.ne... [minecraft.net], using these instructions does not work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] I suspect the .mcworld files for Education Edition are locked out of the general Windows 10 (Bedrock) edition.

See the comment above by dissy, suggesting that you can get it by buying the Minecraft Bedrock Edition.

This is a solid gold suggestion, thank you.

Any idea if this also works on the XBox One Bedrock Edition?

...and even parents who know their kids' education email addresses may have password reset issues, which only the school district may provide. And the staff to do that reset may not be around for the duration of school closures. Even wealthy K-12 districts often lack the sort of automated "password reset" forms that we take for granted on any commercial website.

Posting this here in the hope that a MSFT dev or PM associated with Minecraft for Education reads it. There's a blocking issue that will prevent many parents who you are trying to help from accessing these resources.

The short version is that Microsoft should consider temporarily suspending the requirement to authenticate on an educational address that's registered with O365. Many parents do not know their student's district-issued email address and during the course of this crisis, many districts will not have staff available to provide it to them.

Additionally it would be helpful to update the documentation both on the announcement page and on the Minecraft for Education webpages to reflect the fact that parents are now hitting the site, and explain the steps that parents need to take to download, install, and access the program. Right now the program and documentation is written on the assumption that it is licensed school or district-wide.

I spent a half-hour in a chat session with O365.support rep and of course she was unable to help me: the problems are in the assumptions that are baked into the authentication app. I will probably be able to contact my district to resolve this for myself, but many parents will not be able to, nor will they understand what they need to be asking for.

For newly-minted parent-educators, the easiest resolution would be if they could attach their kids' education credentialed to their own O365 account. One of the webpages on the Minecraft for Education site suggests doing exactly that, but again, the Microsoft rep I chatted with had no idea of how to do that.

for something that might point to an answer to your questions, see my comment below regarding CTSO and AEMD, and have a read through Cytosorbents' recent investor presentation: http://www.cytosorbents.com/pdf/CTSO_Investor_Presentation_-_Feb_2015.pdf

Cytosorbents and Aethlon appear to be playing in the same space.

Cytosorbents (CTSO: http://www.cytosorb.com/) and Aethlon Medical (AEMD: http://www.aethlonmedical.com/products/hemopurifier.htm), both publicly traded corporations, have built something similar,: an extracorporeal filter that fits into the standard dialysis machine you can find in any hospital. By filtering out "cytokines", which are produced during inflammatory processes, they hope to increase survivability by halting "cytokine storm," which is kind of a runaway feedback-loop which leads to organ failure, septic shock, and death. If it is proved to increase patient survivability, this technology is huge: sepsis is a leading cause of expense and mortality in the United States. If it works as is hoped, there are many lives that could be saved and trainloads of money to be made. This PDF from the company makes the investment case: http://www.cytosorbents.com/pdf/CTSO_Investor_Presentation_-_Feb_2015.pdf

Both companies are attempting to commercialize their technologies and gain approvals in various countries. Cytosorbents has been steadily gaining approvals in the EU and other places worldwide. CTSO hopes to initially crack the US market through a trial using their filter as a part of cardiac surgery. AEMD is pursuing an FDA trial with their filter.

The two-hundred-billion-dollar question is whether their devices will broadly improve patient outcomes: they obviously filter out bad stuff from blood, but the real question is whether that is broadly effective in critical care situations.

I'm not a shill for either company, but I have significant investment gains in both. I'm constantly trying to assess how defensible each company's patent portfolio is, and whether the tech will improve general patent outcomes as much is suggested by a number of preliminary studies. I'd be interested in hearing other informed perspectives, especially from people doing research in this area.