Sakai – the collaboration and learning environment by higher education, for higher education

Sakai Project

Longsight’s customized support programs will help your campus get the most out of Sakai. We’ll help you explore Sakai, set it up on campus or host Sakai at one of our modern data centers with world-class reliability and a service level agreement to match. We will train your staff and faculty and integrate Sakai with your local authentication services and student information systems. We will make sure you get what you need at every step along the way. Our comprehensive support protects your options - no strings attached!

SAKAI AS A SERVICE

Our Sakai as a Service program offers affordable production hosting and support in a comprehensive application services provider agreement, providing access to a dedicated and branded instance of Sakai with no long-term investments that allow you to focus on learning through collaboration, course management, e-portfolios, lesson building and dozens of other tools created by the higher education community.

It’s strategic for your faculty and students to have access to a pedagogically sound, flexible and reliable learning management system. It’s less strategic for you to own and operate the servers, replace them periodically, manage operating system patches and install Sakai upgrades and new tools. Costs range from $7 to $10 per student per year for unlimited number of courses. Longsight’s Sakai as a Service program lets us focus on our core competency while your campus focuses on learning outcomes and teaching success. And we can cut your learning management system costs by 30-80% in the process.

SAKAI MANAGEMENT SERVICES

Through Longsight’s Management Services, you’ll have comprehensive support for your local Sakai installation with options for server management, onsite and online training and full tier 2 level support.

Our Sakai Management Services include pre-implementation planning, training implementation, feature additions, Sakai upgrades, tier 2 and 3 problem resolutions, bug diagnosis, reporting and solution, performance monitoring, faculty/student assessments and optionally, new tool development and integration with campus systems. And our support is available 24x7x365!

SAKAI AUTHENTIC PILOTS

Our Sakai pilot programs provide access to a fully supported and branded instance of Sakai so that your faculty and students can use Sakai in for-credit courses as part of an authentic assessment of the tools. Pilot today to understand your choices tomorrow.

If you’re still considering Sakai as your campus’ learning management system, Longsight can help your stakeholders - your faculty and students - engage in a three- to six-month pilot. We’ll provide access to a custom-branded Sakai Authentic Pilot for up to 400 accounts at no charge if you sign up for one day of on-site training conducted by Longsight staff who are experienced faculty and trainers.

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Longsight welcomes Wellesley College to the Sakai community

DANVILLE, OH., December 4, 2009 – The Longsight Group, a leading provider of support for open source software, announced today that Wellesley College has selected Longsight to host and support Sakai for the College’s collaboration and learning management system.

In announcing the selection of Sakai and Longsight to the campus, Wellesley’s Vice President for Information Services and College Librarian, Micheline Jedrey, noted that Sakai “…has many plusses: a strong set of tools and a strong vendor.”

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Best Practices for Sharing Sakai

The Longsight Group and the CEATH Company have partnered to help colleges and consortia apply the best practices that have earned awards and the attention of many - Sakai Project Supported by Longsight Wins Prestigious Mellon Award.

Sakai Project Supported by Longsight Wins Prestigious Mellon Award

WASHINGTON, D.C. (December 8, 2008) – The Appalachian College Association, a Longsight client, today received the prestigious 2008 Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration for the consortium’s project, “Learning Asset Management Project” or LAMP. LAMP brings together 14,000 students and faculty members of 16 of the Association’s member institutions in a shared instance of Sakai, a leading open source collaboration and learning environment.

Structured Content in Sakai

Sakai is not a box or a set of predetermined pathways into which you plug in your content. Sakai is a highly flexible and capable framework that works best when you approach Sakai with a vision focused on outcomes. Sakai will support your vision for teaching and learning but it’s important that you understand how content is stored and presented to your audience.

Sakai stores content in an internal repository. Sakai can store the simplest, most fundamental pieces of content (an image, for instance) and it can store very complex pieces of content (an entire textbook in PDF, a link to an external program or even a complete web site). [If you store file types that are understood by your web browser, they can be displayed directly by your browser. If you store file types that aren’t suited for display in a web browser, your browser will offer to download, save or open the file with a desktop program of choice.] Sakai can even create and present highly structured lessons based on international standards, but let’s hold off on that discussion for a while.

The Resources tool in Sakai provides a means to manage content in the repository. When the Resources tool is added to a worksite in Sakai, a separate “container” for that worksite’s content is created in the Sakai repository. So the content managed by the Resources tool in “My Workspace” is kept separate from the content managed by the Resources tool in “English 101.” Learners in English 101 can’t see the content in your workspace unless you explicitly grant permissions for the content on an item-by-item basis.

NEOUCOM Sakai

Longsight helped launch a customized version of Sakai for the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine (NEOUCOM) in the summer of 2007.

Longsight integrated Sakai with NEOUCOM's campus LDAP, secured the site and all LDAP connections with SSL, and migrated hundreds of existing quiz pools and content modules from a legacy WebCT installation.

Appalachian College Association

Sakai instance for the ACA
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).

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