Prometheus
Developed by George Washington University, Prometheus is a community-based, open architecture software platform that meets the online infrastructure needs of educational institutions, including Columbia University and Harvard Law School.
Challenge
To build and provide a flexible, scalable online learning platform for colleges and universities throughout the country.
Benefits
· Similar to HTML, ColdFusion is easy to learn
· Scalability—System supports thousands of users across the country and millions of page view each month
· Empowers faculty to update learning content online
Project Details
America's college campuses—ground zero for new trends and ideas—have also been in the vanguard of Internet adoption. Classrooms, labs, offices, and even dormitories are all wired with high-bandwidth connections, enabling all members of the campus community to interact and communicate like never before.
It's not surprising, then, to see how some schools are using that infrastructure to bring higher education to higher levels. Today, using Prometheus, a comprehensive, innovative service written in Macromedia ColdFusion, students and faculty alike can take online courses, participate in real-time discussions, enroll in "distance learning" courses, and even access library materials—all from any Web-connected PC.
A commercial enterprise arising from an internal development project at George Washington University (GW), Prometheus today is used by tens of thousands of students at dozens of high-caliber colleges and universities, including Columbia University, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, University of Texas at Austin, Harvard Law School, Vanderbilt, and the University of Michigan.
Searching for Scalability and Flexibility
The development cycle was initiated by GW in 1999 after it completed an evaluation of commercial alternatives—a search that ultimately proved fruitless. "We were looking for an enterprise solution for course management," said Bo Davis, now managing director of Prometheus, "but the solutions we saw weren't strong enough or scalable enough to support our vision for what we wanted to do. We needed a level of scalability and flexibility that—at the time—would only be achievable through internal development."
Initially, Davis and his team considered coding the new application in Perl, or Active Server Pages. "We looked at those options, but not too carefully, because they would necessitate very long development cycles. Then, Davis got his first in-depth look at Macromedia ColdFusion. "As soon as I got a good look at ColdFusion, I knew that's what we needed and wanted," he said. "I could immediately see that it would enable us to develop very rapidly and I was very confident that we could build a highly scalable service."
Prometheus's implementation featured Macromedia ColdFusion, the fastest way to build and deploy powerful Web applications. ColdFusion helps dramatically accelerate Web development with its intuitive tag-based language and integrated database and debugging tools. ColdFusion also includes a powerful Web application server, featuring an open architecture that allows for complete integration with existing enterprise systems, as well as easy-to-use management tools and server clustering to ensure applications perform optimally and are always available.
A Comprehensive Solution
"The tag-based environment makes ColdFusion very easy to learn," Davis said. "It's a natural progression from HTML, which means it's easy for less-experienced people to learn it. Our team picked it up and was productive very quickly."
In one year, the three-person team (today, the team has grown to 40 professionals) completed the development of the Prometheus service, which offers an impressive and extensive array of features. Professors can use a simple Q&A template to build course content—a course outline, syllabus, reserve reading lists, attachments, and more. Faculty can also rename, reorganize, and remove fields as needed. Each user—administrator or freshman—can also extensively customize the interface.
Other key features include enhanced messaging, threaded discussions, real-time chat, file sharing, electronic reserves, streaming audio/video, online test administration and grading, and much more. Prometheus also extends to mobile devices as well. Students can download class information and assignments directly to Palm PDAs for greater convenience.
Currently, Prometheus is used by 25,000 students nationwide. "By next year, we expect that number to reach 150,000 students," Davis said. "One of the major differentiators of our solution is that our client schools experience very fast adoption. Today, 80 percent of GW students use Prometheus. There are about 9,000 unique logins every week—about half of the student population. At Southern Arkansas University, we saw 25 percent of the students adopt Prometheus within the two months it was offered. This kind of penetration is remarkable for college students, so our customers have been very pleased."
"We were attracted to Prometheus because it is easy to use, flexible, cost-effective and able to scale to our needs as a leader in technology-enhanced education." Gerard McCartney, chief information officer and associate dean, The Wharton School.
Open Source with ColdFusion
Unlike most commercial applications built with ColdFusion, Prometheus' eponymous service is licensed as a 100-percent open source solution. "Any customer gets every line of ColdFusion code," said Davis. "We're trying to empower people—users, faculty, and the IT staff, too. With ColdFusion, our customers can make any modifications they like. If they don't have resources, we can perform that work for them."
In addition, Prometheus also offers its customers the option of licensing the service through an application-service provider model. "Again, not all of our customers have the capacity and resources to take on an additional IT system," Davis said. "About 25 percent of our customers engage us as an ASP partner. That means virtually no additional capital investments in hardware or software for our customers, which lowers any adoption barrier further."
Davis also notes that scalability has been a major advantage for Prometheus. "Today, we already have several million page views a month and we have ambitious growth plans," he said. "We run five Windows NT servers supporting multiple universities. They're all clustered with ClusterCATS and the performance has been excellent.
Site Summary
Prometheus
1922 F Street NW #301
Washington, DC 20052
Macromedia Products:
ColdFusion Enterprise Server 4.5.1 SP1, ColdFusion Studio 4.5.1, Director Shockwave
Studio
Hardware:
7 Dell 2450s (Pentium III 800 MHz, 1 GB RAM); 1 Sun Enterprise 450 (quad-processor
450 MHz, 2GB RAM); 1 Sun Enterprise II (dual-processor 400 MHz, 2GB RAM)
Operating System
Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 SP4; Sun Solaris 2.7 for database management
Database:
Oracle 8i
Size of DB:
800 MB
Internet Connection:
3 Mbps, collocated at AboveNet
Site Traffic:
3 million page views a month by 25,000 users at dozens of institutions
Benefits
-
Rapid Development—The number-one reason we chose ColdFusion was for its
ability to provide rapid development."
Ease of Development—"It's so easy to learn. It's a natural progression from HTML."
Scalability—"We're supporting thousands of users around the country and millions of page views each month on five servers using ClusterCATS."
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