- The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania will adopt Mersive’s Solstice software to enhance visual collaboration amongst students and instructors. Using Solstice within Wharton enables students to achieve a new level of interaction in student study rooms and the classroom centered on visual data.
- Solstice software is a visual collaboration solution enabling multiple users to connect, share and control a display simultaneously from their mobile device—phone, tablet, or computer—using an existing IP network. With Solstice, anyone with a mobile device or laptop can walk into a study room, classroom or meeting room and instantly connect, share and control the display, creating an immediate collaboration session.
- Wharton will be rolling out Solstice in over 70 group study rooms, each equipped with flat panels. Cisco connected classrooms will also be Solstice-enabled, bringing visual collaboration to the larger, classroom setting. The Solstice software includes the ability for multiple people to display multiple pieces of content on the screen at one time; all the while, allowing the instructor to take control of the classroom and moderate what content is permitted to be posted to the display. The roll out of Solstice within Wharton currently includes implementation at its Philadelphia campus but with plans to expand it to other locations. Wharton will also leverage the Solstice Open Control Protocol to integrate with room scheduling and Crestron room control systems.
- “Solstice supports the increased integration of visual collaboration in the learning environment,” said Marko Jarymovych, IT technical director, Wharton. “Incorporating Solstice is a simple software installation that can easily scale from the study rooms to our classrooms and commons areas and leverages the existing equipment we have already invested in. By doing this, we’re able to leverage mobile devices to display connectivity as a critical layer of our technology strategy.”
- Solstice provides a robust collaboration solution for students and transforms displays into network devices that are part of the IT infrastructure. The Solstice Dashboard enables the school’s IT administration staff to centrally manage all the Solstice displays across campus. The Dashboard also creates the opportunity for Wharton to see how many people are connected to the various displays throughout the campus to learn more about display usage, while providing new types of intelligence around how classrooms and study rooms are being used.
- “Wharton is leading the way amongst a number of top business schools whom are rolling out Solstice to achieve a new level of technology-aided learning,” said Rob Balgley, CEO, Mersive. “As a software only solution, Solstice is remarkable in its simplicity, enabling a very quick learning curve, yet offering enterprise-class capabilities, including the Solstice Dashboard, Directory Service, and Open Control Protocol, which easily supports scaling across large, higher-education facilities.”
