Welcome to SolidProfessor, your engineering team's online continuous-learning platform. Our mission is to assist you in achieving your personal and professional goals through our extensive video lessons, exercises, certificates, and certification prep courses, which cover a wide range of topics, including CAD, CAM, and BIM software, engineering methods, and much more.
Your SolidProfessor dashboard is personalized to your viewing history, accessible from any part of the library using the top banner, and based on your viewing habits. Designed primarily to help you quickly get back into what you were working on.
The top section, "Pick up where you left off", will link directly to the most recent courses or groups you were working in.
Below that you can access the SolidProfessor Learning Paths, followed by tabs that give you access to all of the lessons you've bookmarked throughout the platform, and a short history of your most recently viewed lessons.
The right side of the dashboard has additional links to various parts of the platform.
'Work on your assignments' and 'Explore the course library' will take you to the top level of your groups page, and the general library respectively, while clicking view your test results will take you to your Profile page, where you'll be able to find the results for any tests you've taken.
The "Download the SOLIDWORKS Add-In" button will do as it says, and download the SolidProfessor Add-In that allows you to view the platform directly from the SOLIDWORKS task pane.
Beneath that you'll find the News tab, which updates with new posts made to the SolidProfessor blog, and can be filtered by category to help you find topics you're interested in.
Lastly, the Resources tab, gives you quick links to the knowledge base and front page of the website, as well as our direct line.
SolidProfessor's Library allows you to search for courses and lessons simply by typing the name or keyword of the software you'd like to study.
1. First, locate the 'Library Search Bar' at the top of your screen.
2. Here you will enter in any keywords and then select 'Enter'. In this example we will enter in keyword 'SOLIDWORKS'.
As you can see, a list of courses and lessons that appear for this software.
3. Next, you can click on the 'Filter Results' bar. You can now narrow your search results using the 'Software', 'Version' (year), and 'Type' filters.
4. You can also access the library from the 'Explore the course library' button on the right.
5. Here you can view all top-level topics displayed as individual tiles and sorted by popularity.
6. The tiles display how many content courses and hours are available on a particular topic.
7. Clicking on one of the software tiles will display these courses in increasing complexity, creating a natural learning path for you. For this example, we will look at SOLIDWORKS. (Please see below)
8. As you can see, when you click on a topic, not only are all courses for this topic displayed, but also every version of every course is available to you. Using the filtering options on the left, you can refine the topic similar to what we did with the first library search option.
9. Here we will select 'Version: 2023' and 'Type: Courses'. You can view all of your applied filters at the top of the page, along with the number of search results.
10. For the next part of our 'Getting Started as a Learner' Guide (Viewing Content in the Library), we will be selecting SolidProfessor's '2023: SOLIDWORKS Beginner to Certification Course.'
1. You can start by clicking into any course you're interested in, for this example, we will click into SolidProfessor's '2023: SOLIDWORKS Beginner to Certification Course.'
2. Here, you'll notice the course description at the top, followed by the lesson player and course outline directly below.
3. When the lesson player is showing a video lesson, you'll notice that it has the same playback options as the pop out player, as well as an additional option to rewind 10 seconds on the left side
4. Clicking the Next Lesson button will progress you through the course, and if there is a lesson file associated with the course, you can download it by clicking the icon on the left side.
5. The layout button on the right is one of my most frequently toggled options, and will stretch the video player wider across the screen to allow for more detail, without having to commit to a full screen view.
The additional options beneath the lesson player might change slightly from course to course, but when available will let you quickly switch to other versions of the course to better match the software version you're working on.
6. The right side of the page has the scrollable course outline, which is broken up into sections and then lessons. Viewed lessons will display in grey with a viewed icon.
Please note: Views here DO NOT count towards views in the groups area, even if they're the same content. In order to get credit towards your assignment, you'll need to access the content directly from the groups page.
7. If there is a particular lesson you want to reference later, you can add it to the bookmarks that appear on your dashboard by clicking on the bookmark icon to the left of the lesson name.
8. You can also sort the course by clicking the vertical ellipse at the top right of the outline area.
Now that we know how to locate assigned material and have properly navigated the library, let's take a look at some additional learning resources.
1. Our first additional learning resource will be SolidProfessor's alternative course types. You can find these courses by selecting the program of your interest, for this example we will select SOLIDWORKS from the topic library.
2. Next, will select 'Case Studies' under the Type filter.
3. Unlike our standard library courses that try and teach a toolset, these courses take different approaches to learning. For example, the 3D Model Mayhem course provides a large pool of models at various difficulty levels for you to test your skills on.
Each lesson here is an interactive challenge intended to get you to think about modeling in ways you may not in your normal routines, as well as test yourself by going up against the estimated time to completion.
4. Now let's take a look at Inside the Design.
5. Each section in this course takes a look at a real-world design, and breaks it down using 3D modeling tools and techniques.
6. Additional lessons to download the model and a reference sheet all come together to help inspire you, and show interesting approaches to modeling problems outside your wheelhouse.
