Elizabeth Woyke on Forbes’ Mobilized blog has a story today about how Apple has swiftly stepped in to replace recently ordered iPads with iPad 2s at a New Jersey school. Woyke says that since last July, Rutgers’ Center for Management Development, the executive education branch of the New Jersey university, has been offering several different iPad-based business courses, including digital marketing and social media marketing. The digital marketing course was planning to use the original iPads, as it started a few days prior to the iPad 2's March 11 release date, but Woyke reports that the school’s local Apple store, in Freehold, NJ, took back all the iPads that Rutgers had bought, and will replace them with new iPad 2s on March 11. The store has also said that it will not be charging a restocking fee for doing so, despite the fact that Rutgers had already installed their own educational software on the original iPads.

“We expected to have to tell the students that it was just unfortunate timing,” Faculty Chair Eric Greenberg told Woyke. “But Apple really surprised me by being so flexible.”

The students on the course actually buy the iPads themselves, as part of their course fee, and get to keep them afterwards. Greenberg says that he is looking forward to integrating the iPad 2's new features into the class, particularly the two cameras, which he intends to use to project images onto screens in the classroom, and to run augmented reality apps.

Woyke says that Rutgers also plans to port its entire social media course over to the iPad in the near future.

Source: Apple Lets Some Students Exchange iPads For iPad 2s - Elizabeth Woyke - Mobilized - Forbes

That's very cool of apple to do that.