The Appalachian College Association has relied on The Longsight Group for the past three years to provide Sakai hosting and support services as part of their major consortial initiative called LAMP. The ACA conducts many initiatives to support its members, none more significant than its Learning Asset Management Project (LAMP).
“LAMP uses technology to facilitate collaboration between member colleges, to link the bundle of sticks,” said Martin Ramsay, Former Chief Instructional Technologist for the Appalachian College Association (ACA). The ACA had been providing a shared instance of WebCT Vista to its members, but wanted to move to a more collaborative, open source platform and selected Sakai. “We also wanted to partner with a company that would host Sakai for us that understood our challenges. Longsight was just the company we were looking for. Longsight understands higher education. They understand open source. Most importantly, they understand collaboration. The folks at Longsight have been a joy to work with.”
This ground-breaking model for sharing Sakai has been featured recently at WebProNews.
Central Appalachia is a region of the US that is isolated geographically and challenged by higher unemployment, lower high school and college graduation rates, and higher poverty than national averages. It is here, in the mountainous regions of Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina that the Appalachian College Association, a consortium representing 35 private, liberal arts colleges and universities, tries to make a difference for the 39,000 students on its member campuses. “We like to use the analogy of a bundle of sticks,” said Ramsay. “Individually, a stick can be broken, but, bundled together with other sticks, it can be a strong and resilient force. That’s what we try to do for our member schools – help them work together like a bundle of sticks.”
The LAMP initiative at the ACA has been live since April 28, 2006. “Longsight has been with us every step of the way,” said Ramsay. “The Longsight team helped us configure Sakai to our specifications and provided our initial training. Even better, we have similar working styles. We both believe strongly in collaboration and in the open source philosophy. Longsight has been the ideal partner for us in our LAMP initiative.”
The Appalachian College Association is headquartered in Berea, Kentucky and online at http://www.acaweb.org.
The Longsight Group provides open source support services. You can learn more at http://www.longsight.com/open-source/sakai.
