I’ve always liked The Hershey Company. Before now it was mostly for the delicious morsels they stack candy shelves with, but now I’m even more impressed with the company because of what it’s doing for the underprivileged youth in both the U.S. and Ghana.

In the summer of 2012, Cisco’s own Ed Schermerhorn worked with Hershey to help deliver telepresence to 80 elementary students in the U.S. and Ghana. The goal of the project? To provide an enriched educational experience by creating a collaborative learning environment where students were provided with curriculum developed by teachers in both Hershey, Pennsylvania and Ghana.

It’s such an interesting story and quite an adventure Ed went on. To hear more about his journey, read about it first hand in Ed’s latest post: A Delicious Experience: Connecting Kids in Rural Ghana with Kids at Hershey’s via Telepresence

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, connected classroom, education, edutech, hershey, TelePresence

Frustrated. That’s how Wharton School of Business Professor Karl Ulrich feels when he cannot engage with students enrolled in the prestigious University of Pennsylvania’s remote campus in San Francisco.

Given how many hats members of the faculty from the school wear, it’s a real challenge. Take Ulrich. In addition to his duties as a professor, he also serves as the Vice Dean of Innovation at the Wharton School. Add to that his work as a researcher, entrepreneur and author, and you get a professor who wants to spend time with students -- but can’t -- due to time and distance. The same is true of remote students who are eager to spend time with the Philadelphia-based professors for which Wharton is renowned. It’s been frustrating!

Until now.

Today, Wharton and Cisco are taking the wraps off a technology that will change the way we look at education. In the “Cisco Connected Classrooms” unveiled in San Francisco and Philadelphia, Wharton educators can interact with remote students separated by thousands of miles as though they were in the same room. I’ve had a chance to join students and professors today and experience first-hand how we can transform education and become truly collaborative. I want to congratulate the Cisco Collaboration Technology Group, Inder Sidhu and Shailendra Gupta, and the educators and technologists from Wharton. They have produced a true breakthrough in education.

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Tags: collaboration, connected classroom, Future of Education, TelePresence, Wharton

I am proud to be part of a company that is making innovations in education on a daily basis. You may have already heard how universities around the world are using Cisco to transform the classroom, and today’s news is further evidence of this.

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is working with Cisco to provide collaboration solutions that will bridge faculty and students in Philadelphia and San Francisco to deliver the classroom of the future. As one of the country’s most esteemed colleges, the Wharton School is using Cisco’s collaboration technologies, including Cisco TelePresence, to bridge the classrooms across the United States. In the future, they hope to extend these benefits to Wharton’s classrooms around the globe, including Asia, Europe and South America.

Most of Wharton’s star-studded professors are based in Pennsylvania and frequently travel to the San Francisco satellite campus that caters to Silicon Valley executives aiming for an MBA.  Read More »

Tags: Classroom of the Future, collaboration, connected classroom, distance learning, education, higher education, jabber, TelePresence, university of pennsylvania, video, Wharton