[Building Sakai] LTI roles in portfolio sites

[Charles Severance]

Sean,

This does not exactly tie you to Sakai.  You will find other mechanisms in other LMS's to let you accomplish similar things - they are just not identical.

As you encounter your first customers on other LMS's you will need to figure out how to get the info you need and build up alternatives in your code.

This is why  we encourage the sending of a string in the ext_lms= field to identify the LMS.

A truly rich external LTI 1.x application is aware of the different LMS systems and takes advantage of each of their extensions to achieve their goals.

And yes of course - "WHY DID WE NOT STANDARD ALL THIS STUFF A LONG TIME AGO????" - Because it is harder than it looks :)  Everyone has a quite divergent view of what to make the whole marketplace do next now that we have launch and grades.

Once you accept that all LMS's are not identical and train your code to know the difference at these extension points - you can take advantage of the Sakai and Canvas service extensions.  A key trick is to always make sure you can fall back to the LMS's which provide more straight-up LTI 1.x implementations like Blackboard and Moodle.

It is also the reason that I will be putting so much time this summer and the next couple of years building and then advocating for LTI 2.0 - because it allows new subset standards to be built across sets of vendors and then expanded to the market as need dictates.

By adding extensions as services (i.e. like a role service) we can create a standard without re-issuing then entire LTI spec and forcing every implementation of the core code to evolve every time we want to make a change.

/Chuck

On Mar 29, 2013, at 7:31 AM, Sean Keesler wrote:

> Sakai 2.9.1 and  basiclti-2.1.0-rc01 is going to work fine for us.
> We are using it to integrate an alternative portfolio tool from HEC
> Montreal for Kyoto University and deploy a leadership portfolio
> curriculum for our friends in Japan.
> 
> Unfortunately, this approach (of using custom LTI launch parameters to
> LTI) seems to tie us to Sakai.
> I suppose this is more a call to action to build common language
> amongst the portfolio community to get a set of standard LIS roles
> than a problem with the technology. (wa waa waaaa)   ;)
> Sean Keesler
> 326 Stone Quarry Rd
> Ithaca, NY 14850
> 607-227-0276
> sean.keesler at threecanoes.com