Thanks for checking out the LTI page. I am slowly getting the presentation content onto this page. Might take another day or two to get the whole lot on here, but please enjoy what’s here so far and check back again soon 🙂 

What’s this LTI thing?

Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) is a standardised framework for data exchange between a Learning Management System and an external activity or tool. It’s a framework that we can use to make our own custom activities that can seamlessly plug into our LMS.

Is it like making a plugin?

Not quite. A plugin is installed directly onto your LMS. Plugins are specific bundles of code that extend very specific versions of a system.

An external activity or service that uses LTI is hosted on a separate server, independent of the LMS (if it’s a commercial LTI tool then it’s likely serving many institutions and LMSes), but is often embedded seamlessly into the the LMS (often with an iFrame).

You’ve possibly embedded a YouTube video into a course page before. Imagine something a little bit like that, but with an extra (and very important) element of trusted data that can pass between the LMS and the external tool.

What kind of data can be passed over to our tool using LTI?

Heaps of things: the user’s name, institutional ID number, email address, the course code and title they came from.. lots!

Have a look at this page at the “POST Parameters” bit.

(more to come soon..)

Handy links

Official reference guide

Learning Tools Interoperability
The official page of the group responsible for the LTI standard.
For a typical LMS configuration in 2018, it’s best to read the LTI1.1 or LTI1.3 info rather than LTI Advantage.

Background reading

ACRL TechConnect article on Making a Basic LTI App
This helped me understand some of the basics and structure of LTI.

LTI emulation tools

These are handy for testing your data flow and getting some insight into how other systems would provide or consume LTI data from you.

IMS LTI Tool Consumer emulator
http://ltiapps.net/test/tc.php

saLTIre testing tool
http://lti.tools/saltire/

OAuth tools

OAuth 1.0 Authentication Sandbox
I used the “Create Your Own” option near the top a couple of times to test where my signature generation code is creating the right thing.