PTC has launched Onshape Education Enterprise, a new premium edition of Onshape designed for schools and universities with unique administrative needs that come from managing student usage across classes, departments, and school organisations.
Onshape Education Enterprise aims to help scale access, manage permissions, and gain insight into student design activity through exclusive admin and analytics features.
Onshape Education Standard plan, launched in 2016, will still remain, but Onshape says that as schools and universities scale up their adoption of cloud CAD and collaboration tools for the upcoming school year – something more prevalent given Covid-19 restrictions – software and admin needs will become more complex.
With the administrative and IT challenges in mind, Onshape has developed the Onshape Education Enterprise plan.
Onshape says that Education Enterprise can be easily scaled across large classes, departments, and institutions; with platform analytics providing visibility into student usage and activity, and administrative features allow for easy management of permissions and sharing within an institution’s private domain.
“We created the Onshape Education Enterprise plan because we wanted to give faculty and instructors the ability to manage their CAD courses and CAD activities like they have never been able to do before,” says PTC Academic SVP Dr. Jordan Cox.
“The administrative features, built-in class management capabilities and platform analytics unique to the Education Enterprise plan make it possible for faculty to focus on teaching design rather than spending their time troubleshooting technical and administrative issues.”
The Education Enterprise plan can allow instructors and administrators to quickly grant Onshape access to as many as 500 students with a couple of different options: single sign-on (SSO) and bulk upload.
The system is designed to be able to integrate with existing SSO systems, which means an IT administrator can enable students to use their existing school accounts to access Onshape.
If an institution doesn’t employ an SSO system, it can simply add students to an Education Enterprise account via a bulk upload, instead of asking students to individually register for their own accounts.
Analyical feedback should also help educators – allowing them to see how much time each team member has spent in it. Or giving the average completion time from a particular assignment to consider if it requires a more in-depth lecture, or if the assignment should be scaled down.
It’s also possible to identify if a student is struggling in a certain area, cheating (via revision history and activity logs), or to track the number of active users and Documents.
Onshape Documents are ultimately owned by administrators, who have both control and visibility. Additionally, account instructors/administrators can assign roles and grant access to view, edit, or share Documents based on those roles.
PTC acquired Onshape at the end of 2019 – read more about this here.
