Company History

Terra Dotta, which means learned world in Italian, was founded by Brandon S. 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 or mobile device connected to the Internet.

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 at the time were able to organize textual data, they did not address the multimedia needs of many classrooms. Edufolio was the first software product they created and was used by UNC until 2009 to address these specific multimedia needs through an easy-to-use interface for students and instructors.

When UNC’s Office of Study Abroad was looking to automate their student application process, they contracted Lee and Christian to develop the new system. The project was very successful, but the pair was not satisfied with simply an online application and encouraged the directors to put their entire office process on the web. A year later they had added online brochures, automated decision letters, insurance calculations and much more. The experience Lee and Christian gained in study abroad process management provided the basis for StudioAbroad.

StudioAbroad was born after a demonstration of UNC's new online processes at a 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.

Terra Dotta has since expanded the software product line to address the need for automated enrollment processing in other areas within a university setting, resulting in RiskInfoSys, i3s, Colloquia, WorldCompetencies and ApplicationGateway that meet a wide range of campus needs. Over the years, Terra Dotta software has continued to grow and adapt based on customer feedback in an effort to meet the ever-changing needs of the international and higher education communities.