This new announcement furthers Dassault’s collaboration with educators and institutions of higher learning by delivering its full suite of software to students and professors, and giving them access to all of the benefits of the cloud.
According to Dassault, the cloud-enabled 3DEXPERIENCE platform extends the classroom well beyond the campus walls. With the cloud, educators can use Dassault’s intuitive web-based UI to create distance learning classes, MOOCs and other environments for collaborative learning.
From a student’s perspective, the cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE gives them access to projects and discussions that were once only possible at a lab-based workstation.
“Getting the 3DEXPERIENCE for Academia on the cloud up and running took just under an hour,” said Michel Michaud, Instructor at École nationale d’aérotechnique in Canada and an early adopter of the program.
While Dassault’s move to bring the cloud to education is a great way to get kids hooked on CATIA, Solidworks, SIMULIA and other products, it also represents a growing trend in CAD.
In the coming years it looks like CAD could find itself moving away from workstations and onto more mobile platforms such as laptops, tablets and smartphones. For me, that’s an exciting current, and it’s one that could greatly reduce the cost of entry into the world of design and manufacturing.
If you no longer need to buy a workstation to get SolidWorks, if you can calculate your boundary surfaces and sweeps on an affordable machine, it might help create a new world of more accessible design. I think that’s a good thing.
Source: Dassault