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March 18, 2002 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Sun Microsystems, Inc. (sun.com), a hardware, software and services provider, today announced that it has chosen the University of Wisconsin System’s dot.edu department, housed at the Milwaukee campus as a Sun Center of Excellence in e-learning. The Digital Online Technology Educational Design Utility, known as dot.edu, is an e-learning infrastructure provider for educational institutions both inside and outside the state of Wisconsin, including K-12, university, technical and community colleges. Using e-learning software solutions from Blackboard Inc.(blackboard.com), dot.edu has placed more than 10,000 courses online since the department was founded in 1999.
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Providing instructional design, software training, hosting services, and a 24/7 service desk for online course development, dot.edu uses Sun Enterprise and Workgroup Servers and Sun StorEdge T3 and Workgroup Storage. The Web-based user community includes some 126,000 users ranging in age from pre-kindergarten to university students.
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Sun’s Center of Excellence program includes 32 centers worldwide in the areas of high performance computing, computational biology, digital libraries and e-learning. To date, there are two Sun Centers of Excellence in e-learning globally: dot.edu at the University of Wisconsin System and the University of Alberta, Canada. The Sun Center of Excellence program recognizes outstanding work performed by an educational institution and a third party, either an industry partner or a fellow educational institution.
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?dot.edu builds upon the inherent benefits of Web-based learning — effective resource management, sharing of best practices, student-focused learning — and it offers these benefits via an application service provider model,? said Kim Jones, vice president of global education and research for Sun Microsystems.
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?This model was the basis for naming dot.edu a Sun Center of Excellence. Additionally, using Sun equipment and the course management system offerings from Blackboard, dot.edu provides e-learning services to more than 80 educational institutions, allowing for a seamless educational experience for students of all ages.?
