About Terra Dotta

Terra Dotta , which means learned world in Italian, was founded by Brandon Lee and Garrett Christian in 2001. Their vision is to enhance the delivery of learning capabilities and the administration of schools and other educational organizations through web-based interfaces available on any computer connected to the internet or mobile devices such as cell phones or PDAs.

Brandon S. Lee and Garrett Christian founded Terra Dotta in order to meet instructor's needs that could not be met through other products. As Technology Coordinators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the mid-1990s, Lee and Christian assisted professors and graduate students with implementing technology in the classroom. While content management systems were able to organize textual data, they did not address the multimedia needs of many classrooms. Edufolio was created to address these specific multimedia concerns through an easy-to-use interface for students and instructors.

Also while at UNC, Lee and Christian worked with UNC's Office of Study Abroad to automate the student application processes. The project was very successful, but the pair was not satisified and encouraged the directors to put their entire office process on the web. A year later they had added online brochures, automated acceptance/rejection/waitlist letters, insurance calculations and much more. The experience they gained in study abroad process management provided the basis for StudioAbroad.

StudioAbroad was born after a demonstration of UNC's new online processes at the National Association of Foreign-Study Advisors (NAFSA) conference generated interest from many other study abroad program offices. A team of seven programmers, database experts, graphical artists, and designers worked for 18 months before releasing the initial version of StudioAbroad.

Now on it's eighth release, StudioAbroad continues to grow and adapt based on customer feedback. With each new development, Terra Dotta realized the need for automated application processing in other areas within a university setting, thus giving way to RiskInfoSys, i3s, Colloquia, and Application Gateway.