Clarifying moodle LTI behaviour with Blackboard

Clarifying moodle LTI behaviour with Blackboard

by Stuart Anderson -
Number of replies: 4

Hi,

I've been exploring the LTI connector with moodle as the provider and a Blackboard installation as the consumer.  I have successfully configured both ends to allow students and teachers to pass through to a single course, complete gradable activities, and the mark is passed back to Blackboard when the 30 minute chron-job runs.

However, my ideal setup is to either:

  1. to have a new moodle course created each time the LTI activity is instantiated in a (unique?) Blackboard course by copying an existing template course.

    OR

  2. for a new instance of a single activity type to be created for each LTI instance from Blackboard.


In short, I want a single Blackboard course space to link to specific activities within moodle.  With my current set up, many Blackboard courses will link to a single moodle course or activity created on demand.  This is confusing for students and teachers.  I want students in one Blackboard space to access a single moodle area for their specific moodle activities.


I appreciate the 2.7 documentation on the separate LTI plugin is old now, but it eludes to how this might (or could) be implemented using the LTI spec.  See section "Service for context (course) creation, using other courses as template"

https://docs.moodle.org/27/en/LTI_Provider#Service_for_context_.28course.29_creation.2C_using_other_courses_as_template

I can find one discussion thread where Abhishek Chouhan says be managed get these custom parameters to work.  There is a longer discussion thread on a different site where it is clearer that his attempts were successful.

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=339905


Can anyone with plenty of LTI experience confirm if these custom parameters for context creation (or resource duplication) actually work in the latest version of moodle?  I welcome you "managing my expectations" here.


Thanks,


Stuart Anderson,

University of Manchester, UK


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In reply to Stuart Anderson

Re: Clarifying moodle LTI behaviour with Blackboard

by John Okely -

The create context feature present in the old plugin was not included in core.

If you'd like to see it added, could you create an improvement request?

It would be great to add your use case to the issue so it's clear what the feature is for.


In addition you may be interested in voting for https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-55444 which would allow moodle to put users from each different consumer into a different group so that they could interact and be graded separately.

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In reply to John Okely

Re: Clarifying moodle LTI behaviour with Blackboard

by Stuart Anderson -

Thank you John, that's very helpful.  I'm still getting to grips with my Blackboard to moodle LTI integration, but have just made a big step forwards in the last couple of hours.

Regarding other differences between the old plugin and post 3.2 integrated LTI functionality.  Under the old documentation, I noticed that there was a recommendation to create extra roles (External Student, External Teacher) where a site uses both local and remote (LTI) users.  I can still the logic of doing that, but I can't find a way to set that as a default for all new LTI instances where as a I got the impression this could be configured as a default under the old plugin.  Am I correct that under the 3.2 implementation you can't set default LTI roles and have to apply them on a case by case basis?


Thanks for your help, and yes, I'll think about MDL-55444.


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In reply to Stuart Anderson

Re: Clarifying moodle LTI behaviour with Blackboard

by John Okely -

In the new version the roles are handled for you automatically, so there's no need to map it manually.

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In reply to Stuart Anderson

Re: Clarifying moodle LTI behaviour with Blackboard

by michael frost -

Hi Stuart

LTI is new to me and I have setup a connection with the Blackboard administrator but my entire Moodle page with all site settings appears. Is this supposed to happen? I assumed it would just embed the course in Blackboard without the Moodle Nav bars visible. Is there a different way to tackle this in Moodle or Blackboard?

Thanks

Michael

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