Onshape for Educators: All the New CAD Features for Back-to-School 2026

The end of the school year brings a chaotic whirlwind of wrapping up projects, submitting grades, and (hopefully!) planning some fun for the summer. Throw in some lesson prep and other professional development that many teachers do, and summer is gone before you know it!

If all of these took priority and you missed recent Onshape releases, we’ve got you covered.

Here’s a highlight of some of the best “what’s new” CAD features for teachers, covering updates from both this summer and the past year.

Several of the new features will significantly ease your first weeks back in the classroom, especially if you have large classes with repeated courses or if your students engage with assemblies, drawings, or simulations.

Classes and Assignments Took a Big Step Forward

Clone Courses and Assignments

If you’re teaching the same course across multiple sections, you’re used to rebuilding assignments for each class. Now, you can duplicate entire classes with the “Clone assignment to other classes” option. If you make changes or add assignments throughout the semester, you can clone those, too! Share assignments across multiple classes in one action and choose whether each copy publishes immediately or saves as a draft you can tweak first.

Scheduled Assignments

Build your whole semester on that in-service day, then set each assignment to publish itself automatically on the date you want. No more manually flipping something live before first period.

Subfolder Sharing

Share an individual subfolder without exposing or duplicating the whole parent folder. Handy for the moment you’re juggling multiple sections or projects under one enterprise.

Enterprise User List Improvements

A cleaner, easier-to-navigate view of your enterprise’s user list. This is genuinely useful once your roster count creeps past a couple dozen names.

Education Access to Explore Onshape

New students and educators now get a guided, built-in walkthrough of the product. Day one is a lot less “here’s a blank screen, good luck” and a lot more “here’s where to start.”

Education Enterprise Quality Improvements

Upload Students to a Class by CSV

If you’re setting up sections at the start of a term, this is the one that actually saves you an afternoon. Create all your classes, then go to your enterprise user settings and bulk-add all students to the enterprise and classes at once via CSV.

Extended Enterprise Invite Window

Student invites now stay valid for 48 hours instead of just 1. This translates into fewer “my invite expired, can you resend it” emails in your inbox during the first week.

Are You Getting the Most Out of the Education Tools?

Individually, none of these are flashy. Together, they add up to noticeably less administrative overhead before your students ever open a document.

And if some of this is a surprise that it ever existed at all (no judgment, Onshape has a lot to offer!), here are a few things you can do:

1. Make sure you’re on an Educator plan (check the bottom left of your home page) and upgrade your account if needed.
2. Check out the Learning Center for help setting up your classes, assignments, and enterprise:
   • Teaching a Class in Onshape
   • Introduction to Education Enterprise

Onshape Product Updates for Educators

Let’s take a look at the highlights that dropped in recent releases. These should be some pretty exciting things that your students can use once classes are underway, especially if you teach anything involving mates (robotics, mechanisms, multi-part assemblies).

Mate Connectors Can Reference Other Mate Connectors

Before, if you needed a mate connector positioned relative to another connector rather than raw geometry, you were stuck building workarounds. Now it’s direct. For students, this means less time fighting the assembly and more time thinking about how their mechanism actually moves, which is the whole point of the exercise.

Mate Connectors Now Follow Geometry When Moved

This improvement closes a classic “why did my whole assembly just break?” moment that trips up many students working iteratively.

Assembly-Level Instance Properties

These let you tag metadata to a specific instance of a part without touching the original, which is useful when your students start thinking about BOMs and documentation instead of just geometry.

Drawings Had Several Nice Upgrades

Every single release since April touched drawings in some way. Individually, these are small. Together, they add up to a noticeably better drafting experience:

Arc Length Dimension

A long-requested addition for anyone dimensioning curved parts.

Axis Auxiliary Views

Create a view looking straight down a cylindrical axis, which is exactly what you want for showing threaded or drilled features cleanly.

Attach Comments Directly to Sketch Dimensions

Handy for capstone teams leaving notes on design intent for teammates or graders.

Copy a Drawing Sheet Across Workspaces

Reuse a template sheet without rebuilding it from scratch every time. Great for anyone standardizing a class-wide drawing template.

Enhanced Circular Measurements

Click a circle, get center distance, min/max, and axis information all at once.

None of these are individually a headline feature, but if you’re teaching engineering documentation this fall, your students are about to have an easier time of it.

Workspace Upgrades that Fly Under the Radar

Persistent Measure

Persistent Measure is sneaky good. Measurements now stay on screen and update live as you interact with the model, instead of disappearing the second you click away. If you've ever watched a student re-measure the same edge five times in one sitting, you know exactly why this matters.

Active Command Highlighting

Pair that with Active Command Highlighting, which means toolbar buttons now visually indicate the active command, and beginners get a much clearer sense of what tool they’re actually in. It’s a small UI change with real impact for anyone still building muscle memory with the interface.

Simulation You Can Walk Away From

Asynchronous Simulation

Asynchronous Simulation is a genuine workflow change, not just a nice-to-have. Submit a simulation study, keep modeling while it runs, and find your results stored in version history when it's done. This is good for any course that includes structural or stress analysis, so students aren’t stuck staring at a progress bar during a 50-minute class period.

Your Models Are AR-Ready

GLB Format Translation

Onshape now natively exports .GLB, which is the standard format for AR/VR/XR applications. If your program touches makerspaces, AR design challenges, or anything cross-curricular with digital media, this is worth exploring. It’s a much shorter path from the CAD model to something students can view in augmented reality.

The Big One: Onshape Labs

This summer also marked the launch of Onshape Labs, a new initiative for shipping experimental features faster, outside the usual three-week release cycle.

The first feature out the door was an NVIDIA SimReady Publisher app, which connects an Onshape assembly straight into Isaac Sim for robotics simulation.

Also just released, FeatureScript Co-Complete, which gives context-aware suggestions while writing custom features.

If you run a robotics program or a STEM club with any simulation ambitions, this is the update to actually sit down and try. It’s early, and it's exactly the kind of thing worth exploring with students before the rest of the world catches on.

Worth Noting: Model-Based Definition

Model-Based Definition (MBD) was released last year and is a game-changer in project documentation. MBD embeds all product manufacturing information directly in the model, so information such as tolerances and part annotations is easily accessible and part of the initial design.

Check it out and see how Onshape is leading the charge into the future of engineering design.

Back-to-School 2026 with New CAD Features

Onshape has put a ton of thought and effort into teaching workflow requests, along with great product updates for modeling. For the full technical details on any release, the Onshape Changelog is always the source of truth.

Set up your classes, schedule your assignments, and get into all the great projects your students will love designing with Onshape.