Creating a virtual classroom

Moore’s telepresence technology offers a remarkable new level of interconnectivity

By Leslie Haynsworth

University of South Carolina | 1918 | Darla Moore School of Business

Connecting our students with the world beyond our classroom walls has long been a core goal of the Darla Moore School of Business.

But when faculty have talked of bringing the world into their classrooms, they’ve typically spoken more metaphorically than literally. Now our new telepresence technology is changing that, and in the process, making global interconnectivity possible for our students to a degree that would have been unimaginable even a few years ago.

Created in conjunction with two corporate partners, Polycom and Cisco, telepresence classrooms are putting the Moore School in the forefront of the movement to expand students’ horizons via technology. Telepresence, which is designed to allow for true face-to-face interaction between people no matter where they are in the world, can allow Moore School students to en-gage in a real-time dialogue with fellow students in the Middle East, with instructors in Europe, with business experts in New York … the possibilities are limitless.

While other universities have used telepresence to conduct meetings, the Moore School is one of the first to use it to reshape students’ classroom experience. With this technology, “we’re bringing South Carolina into the world and the world into South Carolina,” said Moore School Associate Dean Raymond Smith.

What makes telepresence remarkable, Smith said, is that the technology is so advanced it becomes all but invisible — people forget they’re communicating via a television screen and feel as if they’re conversing in the same room, no matter how far apart they actually are.

“To connect with each other in a meaningful way,” Smith said, “people need to be able to look one another in the eye and read each other’s facial expressions.”

Older forms of teleconferencing allowed people to see one another, but not to make eye contact, so the technological interface was jarring and distracting. Telepresence uses specially-adapted cameras that put people into more direct and meaningful contact with one another via TV screens that make each appear life-size and allow for seamless, real-time interaction. Conver-sation becomes as natural as if both people were in the same room.

That makes the telepresence classroom a truly unique learning environment, Smith said. “Now you can bring experts into the classroom without having to bring them to campus,” he said. “And business students from all over the world can talk to each other in a way that was previously possible only if they were all in the same room.”

In that respect the telepresence classroom can be an even more effective learning environ-ment for international business students than a classroom in which students from around the world are meeting in person.

“When students from other countries come here, they inevitably begin to adopt at least some American habits of dress and behavior and some American perspectives,” Smith said. “So when you talk to them, their viewpoint is somewhat distilled by the fact that they’re here. But in a class that’s conducted via telepresence, everyone remains in their home environment, and in their original sociocultural context.

“So what we see is that they bring their national identity and perspective to the table more clearly. And that’s important for our students because if you’re going to do business in other countries, you need to have a strong understanding of cultural differences and how to negotiate them effectively.”

While the advantages of telepresence for international students might be particularly appar-ent, they’re not the only members of the Moore School community who benefit from the new technology. It will also soon be used in distance learning programs like executive education and the Professional MBA program to create a more interactive learning environment.

In the past, PMBA students at regional sites around the state would watch live televised broadcasts of their courses but couldn’t easily join in class discussion. Now telepresence effective-ly will bring them into the same room with the professor and with fellow students around South Carolina. When they ask questions, the professor can see them and respond immediately. And if a student in Beaufort and a student in Spartanburg both take an interest in the same topic, they will be able to discuss it easily.

“What we want to do is optimize the learning environment and the learning experience for all of our students as fully as we can. Telepresence allows us to do that in really significant new ways,” Smith said.

Moore’s telepresence initiative began with Smith’s observation that Cisco’s business telecon-ferencing technology might also be useful in the classroom.

“The ability to converse as if you’re all in the same room without having to all travel to the same site really speeds the decision-making process,” Smith said. “And because of the way it reduces travel, it’s also a very green, sustainable business model.”

More to the point, Smith saw the technology as a way for Moore to expand its global net-work for the benefit of both students and alumni.

“Once you start playing around with the technology, there are so many things you can do with it,” he said. He approached Cisco and found that they hadn’t yet begun to explore what their technology could offer in an educational setting. But the prospect of doing so in partner-ship with a leading business school was appealing enough that the company made an in-kind donation of equipment to establish Moore’s first telepresence studio.

Now Moore’s innovative use of telepresence has inspired a second corporate partner, Poly-com, to collaborate in the creation of an additional telepresence classroom. Headed by Moore School alumnus Andy Miller, Polycom is a world leader in telepresence and video conferencing solutions.

“Polycom is very interested in helping us see where this technology can lead us,” Smith said.The technology already is leading Moore students to some pretty interesting places. Last year

a group of executive education students in Professor Tim Carroll’s organization design course used telepresence to meet with NBC executives in New York and present findings and recom-mendations from course projects on NBC Universal.

And this past August, Professor Martin Roth taught a custom executive education course that brought together U.S.-based and European-based executives from Fiberweb, an international leader in nonwoven materials, for a transatlantic training session.

“The technology is easy to use and very comfortable,” Roth said. “Having that ‘natu-ral’ feeling in an education setting is vital. There was no difference between interacting with the group in Columbia or in Germany. Participants seamlessly engaged with me and each other in real time.”

That is precisely what the telepresence technology is supposed to do.

“We’ve designed the technology so that faculty who use it don’t need to change any-thing about the way they teach,” Roth said. “We want the technology to be invisible. Stu-dents and instructors get so much energy from each other when they’re in the classroom, and we wanted to preserve that. So far, all signs suggest that we have. One of the Fiberweb course participants said it was more engaging and less fatiguing than any university program he’d ever done.”

“The technology is

easy to use and very

comfortable. Having that

‘natural’ feeling in an

education setting is vital.

There was no difference

between interacting

with the group in Columbia

or in Germany. Participants

seamlessly engaged with

me and each other

in real time.”

University of South Carolina | 2120 | Darla Moore School of Business