Navigating the Future of eLearning with Expertise and Openness

At Longsight, we offer a deep commitment to open-source solutions while offering unparalleled customization, flexibility, institutional ownership, and control. As long-term advocates in open-source communities, we bring a wealth of experience and a unique perspective that aids institutions in optimizing their academic systems. Our approach is centered on understanding and addressing the specific needs of educational institutions, paving the way for more efficient, accessible, and engaging learning experiences.

ABOUT LONGSIGHT

Founded in 2004, Longsight specializes in providing open-source software solutions tailored for higher education institutions. Our team, leveraging years of experience in educational technology, excels in developing versatile learning platforms suitable for both online and in-person educational settings. As a small but dedicated company, we pride ourselves on our ability to address unique challenges in the higher-ed sector, continually innovating to enhance learning experiences.

DEVELOP

LONGSIGHT develops innovative new capabilities for our clients. We are an active member of the Sakai open source community and contribute all new development to the Sakai community. Our Co-founder, President, and CTO, Sam Ottenhoff was one of Sakai's original developers.

HOST

LONGSIGHT hosts Sakai in the Amazon cloud for universities in the United States and abroad. Our clients rely on us for technical expertise to ensure that Sakai performs optimally. They save money by eliminating the need for on-campus infrastructure and the expertise to maintain it. They can focus on serving faculty, students, and staff. We can increase capacity at a moment's notice, as we did when many institutions moved all learning online because of the coronavirus pandemic.

SUPPORT

LONGSIGHT provides advanced support for our clients as part of our hosting agreements. LONGSIGHT staff has a collective 84 years of Sakai development and support experience. This allows us to help our clients solve LMS issues rapidly and even, in many cases, avoid them entirely.

CLIENTS

Recently, Longsight helped Duke University deal with the coronavirus in China. When the coronavirus outbreak locked down Duke Kunshan University's campus in China, Duke and Duke Kunshan acted quickly to move all Duke Kunshan courses online into Sakai. With 579 undergraduate students and more than 100 faculty scattered across China and well beyond, and with varying levels of internet access and other technology, Sakai’s capabilities enabled Duke Kunshan students to continue their education unimpeded despite the effects of a large and growing global health crisis.

Duke, like all universities in the United States, also closed its domestic campus in Spring 2020 and needed to move all of its online. Longsight rapidly expanded Sakai's cloud capacity to accomplish this.

To read more about Duke’s rapid deployment of online courses in response to the coronavirus, please visit this site.

In 2018, Pepperdine University (working with the University of Virginia) identified a way in which Sakai could better support large lecture courses by automatically creating groups of students for collaborative work and course projects. Longsight partnered closely with Pepperdine staff to define, envision, and implement this meaningful improvement to Sakai -- and contribute it to the Sakai community so that many other institutions worldwide could also benefit.

Watch the video above to see how Pepperdine faculty use Sakai in teaching and learning.

The University of Limerick in Ireland started working with Longsight in 2016. When the EU instituted the GDPR information security protocol, Longsight worked with Limerick to meet their specific regulatory requirements and documented the aspects of Longsight's services that were affected by the GDPR regulations. Longsight worked with Limerick's Cloud Governance Team to make sure that Sakai met the exact GDPR requirements and that the solution was sustainable.

When the University of Limerick closed its campus in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic, Longsight provided all the additional capacity needed for Limerick to transition to fully online teaching. Find more about Limerick's response to the global pandemic here.