The Academy: built-in training and courses inside SimplyPrint

The Academy is a learning space that lives right inside your SimplyPrint account. It is where students and team members work through courses on 3D printing, slicing, design and your own internal procedures, and where teachers and admins assign required training, track progress and take attendance. This guide explains what the Academy is, who it is for, how it is built up, and which plan unlocks each piece.

Table of contents

• What the Academy is
• Who it is for
• How the Academy is built up
• Finding the Academy
• Roles and permissions
• Locking features behind a course
• Feature availability by plan
• Related articles

What the Academy is

The Academy turns SimplyPrint into a place where people learn, not just where machines print. Each course is a set of slides a learner clicks through at their own pace. Slides can hold text, images, animations, videos, quizzes and live embeds (YouTube, Tinkercad, Fusion 360, Google Slides, Kahoot and more), so a course can be anything from a two-minute safety briefing to a full design unit.

On top of the courses themselves, the Academy gives teachers and admins three working tools:

• Reports - see who has completed what, how long they took, and how they answered quiz questions.
• Assignments - require specific courses for specific people, classes or groups, with optional due dates and a sign-off.
• Attendance - open a session and let people sign themselves in, or mark them present yourself.

Because it sits inside the same account as your printers, queue and filament, the Academy can do things a separate learning platform cannot. The biggest one: you can require a course before someone is allowed to print, and automatically grant them more access the moment they finish it.

Who it is for

The Academy was built for two kinds of account:

• Schools and education get the full experience: classes of students, a structured e-learning space, a dedicated teacher and student dashboard, and reporting built around classes and grade ranges.
• Enterprise and larger teams use the same courses, assignments and reporting to onboard staff, run safety and compliance training, and gate access to equipment until people are trained.

Both share the same building blocks. Where the wording differs, school accounts talk about "students" and "classes" while everyone else sees "people" and "groups" - the underlying tools are identical.

How the Academy is built up

The Academy has a simple structure:

1. Categories group your courses by topic (for example "Getting started", "Design", "Safety"). Categories can have subcategories for finer sorting.
2. Courses live inside categories. A course is an ordered set of slides. SimplyPrint provides ready-made public courses, and on the right plan you can build your own.
3. Slides are the individual steps inside a course - a page of content, a quiz, an embedded video and so on.
4. Assignments sit on top: they tie one or more courses to a set of people with rules (due date, required before printing, sign-off).
5. Reports and attendance give you the picture of who is doing what.

Three sources of courses can appear in your Academy:

• Public courses by SimplyPrint - free, ready-made courses available to everyone.
• Your own custom courses - courses your account builds, on the plans that allow it.
• Partner-shared courses - if your account is managed by a SimplyPrint partner, courses they share with you.

Finding the Academy

Open the Academy entry in the left-hand menu (the page lives at /panel/academy). You land on the category and course overview. From here:

• Learners click a course to start working through its slides. Any courses assigned to them appear in a "Your assigned courses" panel at the top.
• Teachers and admins with the right permission see a Reports & assignments button in the top right, which opens the teacher area with the Reports, Assignments and Attendance tabs.

Roles and permissions

Access to each part of the Academy is controlled by user-group permissions, set under Settings > Organization. The relevant permissions are:

A learner only needs "View courses". A teacher who reports and assigns needs "View progress" and "Assign courses". Authoring content is separate again, under "Manage courses".

Locking features behind a course

The Academy connects to SimplyPrint's feature-locks system. You can require people to complete one or more courses before they are allowed to print, slice or use other actions, and automatically upgrade their access (or move a student up a class) the moment they finish.

This is set up two ways:

• On an assignment, turn on "Require before printing" to block printing and other actions until the assigned courses are done.
• Under Settings > Organization > Feature locks, tie a specific course to a specific feature so that finishing the course unlocks it.

See Course assignments for the assignment side, and the feature-locks section in your organization settings for the standing rules.

Feature availability by plan

The Academy and its public courses are available to take on any plan that includes them. Building your own courses, and the teacher reporting and assignment tools, are on the higher education and Enterprise plans.

*Print Farm accounts that subscribed before our Enterprise launch keep custom Academy courses. New Print Farm subscribers need School or Enterprise to build their own courses.

See the pricing page for the full plan comparison.

Related articles

• Course reports for teachers
• Course assignments
• Attendance tracking
• Building and managing courses
• Teacher, student and admin dashboards
• SimplyPrint panel overview

Updated on: 26/06/2026