ACADEMIC CURRICULUM FOR ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING INCLUDING TRADITIONAL SECTORS AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN 3D PRINTING

Additive Manufacturing (or 3D printing) is one of the technologies under the umbrella of Advanced Manufacturing which has been identified by the European Commission as one of the Key Enabling Technologies (KETs) that are able to boost industrial sectors such as Industrial machinery, Aviation, Health, Tools, Metal Fabrication, Electronics, Space or Traditional industries such as Furniture.

Some European reports show that the educational offer in Europe is very different depending on the country: most of the courses are between four and eight hours duration, they linked to one specific technology and none of them are focused on a specific industrial sector. Furthermore, the report shows a lack of common training curricula in Additive Manufacturing in almost all countries. Fablabs and some universities are quite active in developing some training but without any common strategy to follow. Moreover, the training offered with industrial approach is in many cases only offered by the technology providers, focusing the learning offer on their own software and hardware.

This paper aims to identify the most suitable “Training Path” that will define and analyse:
(i) the necessary areas of knowledge and
(ii) the pedagogical approaches to provide the specific needs of a set of target groups (like job profiles) and different industrial sectors in 3D printing.

The work concludes that, the most promising way of applying training curriculum to the target group users is to develop training on the following online basis (on-line e-learning modules): Design and production processes; The current processes, different fields of application; Entrepreneurship and 3D printing: a common view of the world; Application in traditional sector, cases of study. On the other hand, this work defines a training path focuses on breaking down the 3D printing training content into small and manageable training units. The granularity of the units is such that each predefined target group can satisfy its needs by a combination of training units, while assuring that unnecessary training is not received by them, and that necessary training is not missed. Within the training units, the following aspects are included to support the teachers with their training activity: skills, competences and knowledge acquired by the student when completing the training unit; recommended training and assessment methods and the suggested target group.