Will Telepresence change the way we learn?

Imagine you’re in a live classroom of 500 students with students located in geographically dispersed areas – Africa to Iceland to India to Australia to USA. Now imagine that you have multiple teachers who are also located at geographically dispersed areas, with all of them delivering parts of lecture to all of you in real-time. Before you start thinking that all this is science fiction, let me tell you that this type of classroom instruction is actively taking place across the world. The technology enabling it is called telepresence.  The origins of this term can be traced to 1980, when cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky coined this term in an article that outlined his vision for a technology that would a allow a remote participant to feel as if s/he was present at a different location.

Simply put, in current terms telepresence is a technology that allows people located at geographically separated areas to connect with each other in real-time via rich audio and video. It is a type of disruptive innovation having the ability to change the way learning takes place by transforming a classroom into a world-class learning center that provides a highly engaging and impactful experience for learners.

Let’s look at some of the advantages of using telepresence in education:

1. Scalability: Telepresence helps educational institutions scale expertise by providing students access to a larger pool of subject matter experts from across the world. It also allows institutions to expand their reach to students globally through their existing faculty.

2. Greater efficiency: Telepresence presents savings in cost and time for both students and teachers.  Both teachers and students don’t have to travel to multiple locations to deliver or access learning. Additionally, since a large audience can be connected in real time, the learning cost for student is lower than that in traditional classrooms.

3. Better Collaboration and Calibration: Telepresence helps in bringing diverse groups of student and teacher teams together. You can match a particular set of students to a specific set of teachers based on assessments and learning preferences.

4. Reduction in Carbon footprint:  By reducing travel, educational institutions can move faster in achieving their environmental sustainability goals.

So who’s providing telepresence solutions?

Companies such as Cisco, Polycom, and Logitech are the dominant players. The market size of telepresence is estimated to $4 billion. Cisco leads the market, having installed more than 1900 telepresence systems and successfully providing solutions to education institutions across the world. From K-12 to higher education institutions, the interest seems to be a growing interest in using this technology.  While, Duke University is one of the early adopters using telepresence on a large scale, Wharton recently joined the bandwagon.

However, critics of telepresence argue that there are various challenges facing adoption of telepresence solutions. The high fixed costs of setting up telepresence systems (average cost is $300k for a 6 seater telepresence room, not including the costs of owning that space), the lack of interoperability between different telepresence systems (polyfam’s telepresence with Cisco’s),  the advancements in cloud computing, and the use of smartphones as a learning platform all have the potential to impact the sustained use of telepresence systems.  

Verdict: Telepresence is poised to make learning more flexible, adaptable, engaging, and location agnostic. The success of telepresence depends on how much the providers are able to lower the setup costs, how effectively they use the cloud to find ways to better manage these systems, and how well they merge this technology with mobile platforms.