Home Directories Remote Access

Question

Hi,
As a school we are looking to give students access to their home directories from anywhere (preferably with easy access from tablet devices).  We have an on-premise SharePoint Server (2013), and also students have access to Office 365 which could give
them 25GB areas on OneDrive for Business.
The three possibilities I can think of so far (without spending anymore money as budgets are tight, and I am a great believer in using the in-built capabilities of Microsoft Products before outsourcing to 3rd Parties).
Students have user areas on OneDrive for Business in Office 365
This would be great in a way because the files are stored off site freeing space up on our SAN.  But with no ability to make our own backups (can get around this using versioning), our main issue would be the 500MB-1GB art/music files our students generate,
opening and saving these across the Internet would be painful, and although chances are they won't need these at home, I don't want to confuse matters by giving them multiple areas to save things.  Although it's great that it also integrates with office
when they sign in at home or in school, I find it annoying that it creates a SharePoint folder alongside the already existing OneDrive area (very confusing for end users).  When you click this and then on the OneDrive @ Company Name it  gives you
access to Style Library and other config folders as well as Documents (just looks messy to me).  It also means students would have to use web pages to open anything other than office files, I have mapped network drives to OneDrive 
before and it works but is glitchy when clicking through folder structures.  I also don't want to have to sync their files to every workstation they log onto to make the OneDrive for Business shortcut appear in file explorer.
Students have user areas on OneDrive for Business on-premise
This solves the speed problem with large files to an extent although saving large files into SharePoint inevitably takes longer.  We would still have the messy menu with opening office files (explained above) and the issue with opening other
files via web pages. 
Students keep user areas in a directory on our server, using Work Folders to access remotely
After the issues when looking at OneDrive, Work Folders was a ray of light I was hoping would solve the issues.  Keep the existing folder structure but give access from anywhere (with the promised apps for IOS, android and windows devices).  I
set it up and looked good, until I realised you HAVE to sync all of your files to every device you use them with.  So if they're at home on an 16GB iPad for example, their user area is 3GB and they only have 1GB left, they can't access their documents
at all.  Sync would be great as an option, but there is no way for them to simply access their directory at home (even via web page).
Please someone tell me there is a way! (Without spending more money).
Thanks,
Andy

Answer 1

Hi Andy,
Thanks for contacting Microsoft.
From you description, I learnt that the issue you are experiencing is that you want to give students access to their home directories from anywhere without spending more money.
If I misunderstand anything, please feel free to contact me.
I have read all the three possibilities. For the first two possibilities, you had better post them to SharePoint forum. For the third possibilities,  you are right, syncing up is really an issue.
So for this issue, I need to discuss it with our discussion team. I will update you on this as soon as we can.
Best regards,
Sophia Sun
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