University of Utah Academic Outreach and Continuing Education Department Adopts Prometheus Course Management System

The Prometheus course management platform has been adopted by the University of Utah’s (the U) Academic Outreach and Continuing Education Department (AOCE). The department plans to use Prometheus for hosting and developing a broad scope of online learning programs. AOCE consists of nine educational units offering credit, non-credit and professional development courses.

Prometheus is a scalable software solution based on a community source code model that encourages partner institutions to jointly modify and develop the product. It is a full-enterprise, web-based course management system that facilitates a flexible and interactive environment for complete online programs as well as technology-enhanced face-to-face courses.

“A team of webmasters and IT folks here at AOCE chose Prometheus from a wide range of products,” said AOCE Assistant Dean Gary Levy. “We especially liked its functionality, professional appearance and price features. The nice part of Prometheus is that it’s integrated, it’s fairly intuitive and it’s highly menu driven; plus we like the administrative controls.”

Levy added that AOCE is currently implementing the roll out of Prometheus on a number of fronts, including converting the U’s non-term specific correspondence courses to an online environment and creating market-driven online non-credit courses that can be offered both locally and nationally. Additionally, Prometheus is enabling AOCE to provide a complete range of services to host, develop and design for-credit online courses for the U’s faculty across the entire campus.

“With Prometheus, we’ll do the administration; we’ll do the student assistance and faculty training; we’ll house the software and server,” said Levy. “We think that rather than getting faculty to enjoy programming, we’ll do it for them, so they can do what they do best — be instructors and content experts.

Bo Davis, Prometheus Managing Director, said, “We’re thrilled to add the University of Utah’s large continuing education program to our growing list of partners who share in our community source code group. They have a wide spectrum of interesting credit and non-credit programs that they will be converting to the online environment, and it will be exciting to work with them to further enhance the abilities of Prometheus.”

About University of Utah Academic Outreach and Continuing Education

The U’s AOCE offers approximately 950 credit and non-credit courses per semester from within nine units: Educational Technology, the English Language Institute, the Intermountain Academy for Leadership in Higher Education; Lifelong Learning, Preparatory Courses, Professional Education, Travel and Learn, ULEARN and Youth Education.

For more information about AOCE, visit http://www.aoce.utah.edu.

About Prometheus

Prometheus is a community source software platform that was developed in 1997 by The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. in answer to the need for an easy-to-use, scalable enterprise-wide learning platform designed to allow customization for faculty, administrators, and students. Prometheus is based on a ColdFusion multi-tier application that allows it to leverage the power of standard application servers and database technologies to provide a scalable architecture. Prometheus works with academic institution licensees as product development partners. To date, more than 50 higher education institutions have licensed Prometheus.

For a complete list of Prometheus features, visit http://www.prometheus.com, call toll-free 866-295-4107, or email at info@prometheus.com.