John Morgridge: Route to the Future

If John Morgridge has become a kind of evangelist on technology and education, he says it's because Cisco Systems' 3-year-old Networking Academy program has made him "a believer."

As chairman of the board of Cisco Systems and former CEO of the company, the 67-year-old Morgridge is chief advocate for the company's educational efforts, and proudly boasts that the company's Networking Academies are in over 5,700 schools in 96 countries around the world. Not bad for a program that began in earnest in 1997, when Cisco realized that schools couldn't make full use of their products if they didn't first understand how to install them, use them and keep them functioning.

While a number of large technology companies have embarked on educational outreach efforts in recent years, Morgridge says that the San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco is unique in taking on an actual project management role for its Networking Academies -- which require students to complete a comprehensive online curriculum over the course of four 80-hour blocks of study. "A lot of companies give the training, equipment and curriculum, but they're not involved with being the actual project manager," said Morgridge, who is married and a father of two grown children. "You set up the whole distribution system, manage the network, maintain Web sites, select teacher training establishments, provide quality control and update the curriculum every three to six months. It goes on and on. That's far different from just providing a textbook and a course outline."

Still, Morgridge says the large-scale efforts are clearly paying off for Cisco and the students in its Academy program, and the company regularly highlights success stories -- individual and group, domestic and international -- on its Web site. For example, thanks to an agreement signed last September, the company recently announced that 3,200 Cisco Networking Academy students would design networks for more than 40,000 schools in Argentina over 24 months. "There is a real need for people to master technology, and this has turned out to be a superb vehicle to help satisfy that," Morgridge said. "It is changing people's lives and preparing students of all ages for the new economy that is upon us."

Raised in Wauwatosa, Wisc., by parents who were both former teachers, Morgridge has had a lifelong passion for learning and considers education to be the "master enabler." Morgridge -- recently listed by Forbes magazine as one of the 60 richest Americans -- has also put his money where his mouth is, making sizeable contributions to the University of Wisconsin and Stanford University, both alma maters. Given his emphasis on education, he says, technology should never be thought of as the "one, silver-bullet" solution to all that ails schools, but rather should be understood for its unique capacity to breathe new life into specific parts of learning.

Technology "has the unique capability of revitalizing whole activities, education being one," said Morgridge, who also teaches part time at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. "Just look at the impact it has had on libraries, the whole distribution of information, almost all aspects of our lives. It is going to have a huge impact on education, but it is not the whole solution."

While Morgridge is obviously devoted to helping schools make technology a central part of learning, he also knows when to put away his own laptop. He and his wife are confirmed adventurers who climbed Mount Kilimanjaro for a fund-raiser in 1997. And at least once a year, Morgridge travels through different parts of the country with his wife on a decidedly non-technologically advanced vehicle: a bicycle. The couple often contact the governors of the states they ride through, and on a trip to South Dakota two years ago, they stopped in Pierre to see if they could catch up with Gov. William Janklow. The governor was not home at the time of their initial visit, but later dispatched state police officers to track down the couple on their bikes and bring them back to the capitol to talk about a whole host of things -- including technology in schools. Now, between 300 and 400 students in the rural state are receiving training through the Cisco Networking Academy program, including students who live and go to school within an Indian reservation in the northern part of the state. "The students are required to wire the town. They will in effect bring the Internet to that community," Morgridge said.

With multiple years in the field, Morgridge says he has observed more inspirational uses of technology happening in higher-education institutions than in K-12 schools. For example, he describes Virginia Tech's so-called math emporium, a learning center stacked with computers housed in a former supermarket. Entering students fulfill many of the components for basic mathematics courses online at the emporium, testing themselves frequently so that they don't fall behind. Students progress at their own pace, and when they need help, they signal it by putting a red cup on top of their computers. Staff members then know to come over and offer assistance. The course has significantly reduced the dropout rate for certain math courses because "students don't wait until mid-terms to find out that they don't understand something," said Morgridge.

Likewise, the online culture at Williams College in Massachusetts is so intrinsic to the school's broader campus culture that "you can't really be a part of the Williams community unless you're online," Morgridge said. "I understand that because that's the culture of Cisco. You can't be a part of Cisco without being online."

At the high-school and elementary level, though, technology-based learning tends to be oriented more toward individual projects, and hasn't really permeated the deeper culture of learning. "They just haven't gotten there yet," Morgridge said.

Still, he said, schools would be wise to embrace the types of whole-scale changes needed to make technology a central and vital tool of learning. "Technology plays such a fundamental role in our lives. Using it should be as natural to students as reading a book. That means it has got to be in the classroom, and not in the lab down the hall."