Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google


Case Western Adds Product Lifecycle Management to Engineering Program

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 02/11/13

Case Western Reserve University is adding hands-on smarts to its engineering program with a collaboration involving global product development company PTC and the NASA Glenn Research Center. PTC will be donating product lifecycle management (PLM) software and servers to the institution through its academic program, and NASA will be coming up with projects for the students to develop. The initiative was forged through the Strategic Partners for the Advancement of Collaborative Engineering (SPACE), a multidisciplinary, multi-university program that brings together high school and university students with engineers in business to develop projects that give participants real-world experience.

"The educational community needs to get students interested and then maintain that interest for engineering and technical careers," said Michael Grieves, a PLM author and consultant to NASA. "Students that get involved with meaningful projects and the software tools to enable those projects earlier in their education are better equipped to utilize that knowledge in their careers. These are the people who will utilize digital technologies to create, manufacture, and get to market the next generation of products."

PTC is donating Windchill, software for gathering application requirements, and Creo, a computer-aided design application, along with servers for use by students to design, test, and simulate development of new products. Case Western will use the donation to form the beginnings of a product lifecycle management center of excellence, which will be part of its engineering program. Instructors will be able to receive professional development to learn how to integrate the project work into their curriculum. The company said that it has trained more than 45,000 teachers through its academic program; those instructors, in turn, have reached 10 million students.

"Case Western Reserve prides itself on giving our students an education that combines both theory and practical applications in an integrative curriculum," said Iwan Alexander, chair of the university's department of aerospace and mechanical engineering. The work undertaken by the university's students, he added, "will help make Case students more attractive to employers because of the opportunity to apply the skills they acquired in design- and manufacturing-related classes to actual problems in the aerospace sector."

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • Minimalist binary data fragmentation

    Fragmented Data Is Quietly Undermining Student Success and Cybersecurity Hygiene

    Siloed tools, teams, budgets, and resources spread across departments and campuses generate massive amounts of data. However, fragmentation creates unnecessary exposure to security threats and inadvertently reduces student support because no one can see the whole picture.

  • digital brain with network connections

    Microsoft Moving to Internally Developed AI Models in Office Apps

    Microsoft is reportedly using its own in-house artificial intelligence models to handle some workloads in Excel and Outlook, offering new evidence that the company is moving its AI strategy beyond model development and into large-scale cost reduction.

  • AI user wearing orange safety vest

    California Governor Proposes Independent Watchdogs Within AI Safety System

    California Governor Gavin Newsom is proposing a new model of artificial intelligence regulation that would give independent organizations a formal role in evaluating the safety claims made by leading AI companies.

  • circuit patterns

    Anthropic Launches Lower-Cost Claude Sonnet 5

    Anthropic has released Claude Sonnet 5, positioning the model as its most autonomous mid-tier offering to date and a lower-cost alternative to its flagship Opus 4.8 system. The company said the model can plan multi-step tasks, operate tools such as browsers and terminals, and complete agentic work at a level that previously required larger and more expensive models.