Do you remember the mid-90’s? Come on, you remember when Al Gore invented internet LOL. During that time, I was the Director of Engineering for a large automotive parts supplier in Detroit, MI. In addition to managing large groups of engineers and designers, I was responsible to have them trained in CATIA and Ideas. To augment our internal training we would usually send a few designers and engineers for classroom training at local CATIA training providers. Unfortunately, every year they would return from the class with a binder that included a printed PowerPoint file that was useless without an instructor there to explain it.
I would watch them sit at their tubes fumbling with these books trying to remember what they had learned. This annoyed me because these classes were big bucks that sucked up weeks of time and expenses. I took action and developed an internal website to capture best practices in step by step format that was far easier to follow than those useless books. This was basically primitive eLearning.
Several years later (early 2000’s) I started a business that would train designers and engineers over the web within a simulated and narrated interactive training environment located at http://www.scatelearning.com. The company’s name was SCATE, an acronym for Simulated Computer Assisted Teaching Environment. In the first year we trained over two thousand (2,000) students online world wide. I was amazed at the degree of knowledge retention and student satisfaction. In addition, the designers had online access to the training material for 365 days for review purposes. In other words no more fumbling at the tube!
During 2002 I was teaching CATIA V5 classes at Oakland Community College in Auburn Hills, MI. Many of my students were Chrysler CATIA V4 designers looking to upgrade their skills to CATIA V5. I approached the Dean and with his permission, I introduced my students to SCATE’s interactive CATIA V5 online courses (AKA eLearning). To my surprise, within one hour of introducing the CATIA V5 eLearning courses I was no longer teaching the class…their computers were doing it for me, Hmmm.
This is when I realized the power of eLearning and ever since then, my mission as been to make online courses (eLearning) easier to build and more effective for the students to learn from.
If you want to get the most out of your CATIA Training I suggest taking interactive CATIA V5 eLearning courses or build your own using software such as Ignite Pro. You will be surprised at how easy it is. Here are some free CATIA V5 tutorials I developed in the same eLearning format.
If you have any questions feel free to comment.
Thanks,
Author Stephen Sadler 