One of Switzerland’s leading hospitality schools, César Ritz Colleges, recently made the — rather expensive — technological leap from traditional textbooks to iPads

Switzerland’s César Ritz Colleges hotel management school, in an attempt to be at the “forefront of innovation in teaching methods, facilities and courses offered to its students”, recently introduced iPads to its classrooms.
No half measures were taken in rolling out the initiative. Upon deciding to take to tablets, all existing students were issued an iPad and all new students enrolling from now on will receive one.

Rational and Objective
“The iPad has changed the way that students learn right across the globe with information now accessible at the touch of a finger,” says César Ritz Colleges managing director Ronan Fitzgerald, who has led the initiative.

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“In the classroom setting at César Ritz Colleges, students and teachers work together, learn together and generate new content to drive an education revolution. The iPad inspires creativity and hands-on learning with features that are not found in any other educational tool,” he adds.

The initiative was launched with several key objectives: firstly, to offer a new learning experience adapted to individual needs and various lesson and study requirements.

Secondly, the aim was to increase interactivity in the classroom setting, and thirdly to reduce the amount of paper used by providing documents on iPad, including textbooks and other academic materials.

The ‘iPad revolution’, as Fitzgerald refers to it, was rolled out in July 2012, at César Ritz Colleges’ three campuses: Lucerne, Le Bouveret and Brig.

Concept and Investment
The conversion from textbooks to iPads posed a significant logistical challenge for the schools’ technical and operations departments.

“We took an exciting step towards the creation of a fully-interactive learning environment. The iPad does not just replace the textbook for students; it is so much more and has really changed the way that students engage with their studies,” says Fitzgerald.

The Swiss Education Group invested an initial 600,000 Chf (around US $660,574) in 2012 and equipped all students and faculty of César Ritz Colleges with an iPad.

The investment is ongoing as each semester all new students are supplied with an iPad, which comes loaded with four useful and study-specific applications called Pages, Numbers, Keynote and iAnnotate.

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