Chris,
I will follow your advice and write up something a little more final once I have spent some more time with it. Some tips so far:
- When you are doing your initial pressbooks install, make sure you install in directory mode and not subdomains. Subdomains seem to confuse the LTI connection.
- Lumen Learning is a for-profit company that is a champion of OER. It sells a service to colleges and faculty who want to adopt OER by providing a pressbooks site, maintained with additional plugins and analytics. Lumen has acted as good partners with the opensource community and have open sourced the plugins they developed.
- Their github repo: https://github.com/lumenlearning
- Specifically I am using their LTI helper named candela-lti. This plugin acts as a helper to the LTI plugin and both must be installed.
- Network activate the two LTI plugins. From the Network site, enable LTI consumers. This will give you one LTI address for your entire pressbooks network. http://your.pressbooks.site/api/lti/BLOGID
- When you are looking to link to a specific book, you need to replace "BLOGID" with the site ID number from Pressbooks.
- The Site ID number isn't always readily apparent, so I installed the "WP Show Site ID" plugin which adds the site id to the header of the pressbooks site.
Next steps I am taking...
There is an interesting fork of the Candela-LTI. In Indiana Universities fork, instead of creating new users first it searches to see if that user exists. For a university setting that already has a Single Sign On, it may make more sense to create all users at the network level, and allow the LTI to associate users with their books. This would have the advantage of allowing users to access their book through the Moodle LTI connection or directly, whichever they prefer. This is all hypothetical and I haven't tested it yet.
https://github.com/IUeDS/iupb-lti
I also like the export as thin common cartridge link plugin, that makes a separate LTI connection for each chapter. Depending on your course structure and how you want students to access the book this could be interesting. Now that I have the basic LTI plugin working I am going to try this plugin from Lumen again. Both Lumen and Indiana have a fork of this plugin, and I am going to try Lumen's first, because I know Indiana is specifically developing for Canvas integration, and I believe Canvas uses LTI 1.3 while Moodle uses 1.1.
---
I wish pressbooks had an app marketplace like Moodle and Wordpress does with good tracking community support. Let me know what you have found useful.