Center for Educational Technology Services at Middlebury College Selects Prometheus to Create Customized Language Platform for Project 2001
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Prometheus — a community-based, open architecture software platform that meets the online needs of educational institutions and is backed by The George Washington University — announced today that it has been selected by the Center for Educational Technology (CET) at Middlebury College to provide a platform for inter-institutional collaboration for the Center’s Project 2001, which works with a network of over 60 liberal arts colleges to enhance teaching and learning with technology.
As Project 2001 has directed its efforts primarily toward language learning and international curricula, an important factor in the selection of Prometheus was CET’s ability to work with the Prometheus development team to add functionality that allows faculty to enter international characters directly into all elements of the course environment, with the exception of the chat module. Languages supported by this new feature include Western European, Cyrillic, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese. Depending upon user-platform, Unicode (UTF-8) is also supported, with the eventual goal of full Unicode support across all components of its courseware system.
“We like Prometheus because it allows institutions to brand their own programs. It also has a rather open philosophy of accommodating specialcurricular needs. This enabled us to work with them on solving some of the multi-lingual support issues. I believe this kind of flexibility will determine the success or failure of learning management environments in the future,” said Clara Yu, Director of Project 2001, Center for Educational Technology at Middlebury.
“We’re excited to be selected by Project 2001 and will continue to work closely with the program to develop language instruction software to best meet its evolving needs,” said Bo Davis, Managing Director, Prometheus.
About Middlebury College’s Center for Educational Technology
Middlebury College’s Center for Educational Technology was established in 1997 to serve present and future educators — at Middlebury and in the educational community at large-who wish to explore the use of technology for more efficient and effective learning. The Center combines a strong technological infrastructure with a dedicated staff to provide training and support for the design, dissemination, and assessment of pedagogy-based and technology-enhanced methods and materials.
The Center is the home of Project 2001, which is funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to facilitate the collaborative development of technology-enhanced language instruction among 62 liberal arts colleges.
About Prometheus
Prometheus is a community-based, open architecture software platform that meets the online needs of educational institutions and is backed by The George Washington University. Prometheus is located in Washington, D.C. In 1997, a team at GWU began to develop their own online learning software because the available software was not as easy to use, flexible, or scalable as faculty and students at a major university needed. As a result, the team created Prometheus, a scalable software based on proven technologies such as leading databases from Oracle and Microsoft as well as an open source code application built with Cold Fusion. Other leading institutions that have adopted this proven, scalable technology include the Wharton School of Business, Columbia’s Teachers College, New York University, University of Wisconsin’s Learning Innovations, University of Michigan’s School of Engineering, and the US Open University.
