President Shimon Peres
President Shimon PeresFlash 90

President Shimon Peres will try set a new Guinness World Record on Thursday, when he delivers the largest online civics class in the world.

The class will be held at Cisco's headquarters in Netanya and over 6,500 high school students in 215 classrooms across Israel will view it.

The Senior Vice President of Guinness World Records, Marco Frigatti, will arrive in Israel and will verify the record attempt in person.

Peres will deliver the online class using Cisco's advanced technology. Students in from Jerusalem, Be’er Sheva, Tel Aviv, Kuseife, Ofakim, Dimona, Hadera, Tiberias, Tayibe, Nahariya, and other communities across Israel will participate. The participants in the online class will include Jewish and Arab students together.

Israel is a world leader in the technology required for a record of this scale and there are currently efforts to introduce the technology into classrooms across the country. The class will be a live example of the technology which will help digitalize education worldwide, reduce the distance between the center of countries and the periphery, reduce inequality in education and allow for lessons to be delivered by leading experts to thousands of pupils at the same time.

After the lesson the data will be sent to a special results room in which Frigatti will follow the attempt along with representatives of Cisco and the Israeli school system. After the data is processed and analyzed and the numbers of students verified, Frigatti is expected to announce that the record has been broken.

Peres has shown a keen interest in technology and in 2012 was the guest of honor at the World Facebook headquarters, where he and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg launched the Israeli president’s official Facebook page.