LTI is short for Learning Tools Interoperability and is a standard to run courses, that have been created in another tool or LMS (Learning Management System), externally.

In this article you will find information about how aNewSpring can be used as an LTI provider to run your learning journeys in another LMS.

Would you rather follow a brief learning journey about LTI? Follow the Mini Masterclass in our Academy and click the link below:

Mini Masterclass - LTI Explained

Advantage of LTI

If you customer already uses an LMS, it can be useful to run aNewSpring in that LMS using LTI. This way, learners do not have to log in at two different places to follow their learning paths.

Disadvantage of LTI

Results
Only one (final) result can be send to the other LMS via LTI. Learners therefore do not have a result overview within a learning journey that is approached via LTI.

Notifications
When an email address is provided by the LTI consumer, it is better to ensure that learners do not receive notifications. This contains a login link that refers to the learning environment of aNewSpring. Since learners log in via another LMS, they will not be able to log in via that link. 

For this reason, it is advisable to think carefully about the use of functionalities to which notifications are associated. Think about:

  • The MemoTrainer
  • Activities which has to be assesst
    See for this the heading 'When the learner has to wait for a result' at step 2.
  • Discussions
  • Announcements
  • Personal messages of instructors and / or other learners
  • New published activities
  • Conditions for which you want to set a reminder, for example when an activity is available until a certain date
  • Calendar.
  • Events
    When you register learners for an event as administrator.
If you set up a seperate subenvironment especcially for the courses that you want to run via LTI, you can edit the mail notifications for this subenvironment and remove the link that refers to aNewSpring.

1) Ask the support team

To make a connection, you will need an LTI key and secret. Ask us to generate these for you by sending an email to support@anewspring.com. Provide us with the following information:

  • The (sub)environment
    One or more keys can be created for the same sub environment
  • A name for this LTI configuration
    This will be displayed in places where you can select the LTI details.
  • LMS ID
    A learner who gets access through LTI, will get an account in aNewSpring. To recognise the learner in both systems, they will need an external ID. The LMS ID will be placed before this code to make sure that the user is always unique.
Extra options

The following settings are optional, but can be turned on by the support team:

  • LTI Referer (specific URL)
    The referer ensures that the LTI link can only be accessed from a specific URL. This is especially useful when you set up an LTI link for different customers. This prevents learners from different customers, but with the same External ID, from ending up in the same account.
  • Restart the course by next launch
    Learner subscribed via LTI cannot restart the course by default. We can however create a LTI configuration that will allow learners to restart the course when they launch it via LTI. Make sure that your LMS supports resets via a new resource_link_id if you want to use this feature.

2) Select an activity that sends the end result to the other LMS

To send a result when the learning journey has been finished, you can select an activity that will send the LTI result to the other LMS.

To do this, go to the Templates tab and click Edit at the template. Go to the Template settings tab and expand Advanced settings.

Then select an activity at Base course grade on.

It has been defined in the LTI specification that a grade from 0 to 1 can be sent upon completion. It depends on the activity type what score will be send to the LTI consumer.

Assessment
When 80% of the questions has been answered correctly in an assessment, the score that will be sent is 0.8. It's up to the LMS to interpret this the right way.

If you create an assessment that allows for multiple attempts, the score will be send to the other LMS after each attempt.

Lesson
If you create a lesson without questions, you will always receive a score of 0.0 because lessons do not have scores. If you want a lesson to send a score of 1.0 to the LTI Consumer, you can use the following solution:
Add an assessment to the end of your learning journey, and set 'Measure score by' to 'None' in the activity settings. Add a multiple choice question in which the learner can only select one correct answer:

Do you want the whole journey to be completed before they can start this activity? You can use conditions.

Activity with assessments of instructors
The score will only be sent to the LTI consumer during an active session. So when you set up an activity which needs to be assessed by an instructor, the result would not be sent to the LTI consumer immediately after assessing when there is no active session. The learner has to reopen the learning journey via LTI again to send the result to the LTI consumer.

You can also set the activity for Base course grade on when learners already started the learning journey. For those who have already completed this activity, there will be no score send to the LTI consumer.

3) Get the LTI information from aNewSpring

The LTI consumer will need the following information:

  • LTI URL
    This refers to a course in aNewSpring
  • LTI key
  • LTI secret
  • LTI custom parameter (optional)

Learners that will take part through LTI, will be subscribed to the course. Before you can get your LTI information form aNewSpring, the templates should be published and you should have created a course.

Go to the Settings of the course.

You will find the necessary LTI information under Export. Did we set up multiple LTI keys for you? You can select the right one at Select LTI configuration.

LTI information with custom parameters
If the other system supports custom parameters, you can use this link. You will need to send the custom parameter course to give learners direct access.

LTI information without custom parameters
This variety of the information works without a custom parameter. Instead, the external ID is appended to the the LTI link.

When you copy the LTI key and secret, it sometimes happens that there is a space after the code when you paste it. This space may not be present in the input fields of the LTI Consumer, otherwise the connection will not be established.

The course is identified by the LTI ID. This is a code that is taken over in the link or custom parameter. If you want to add a recognizable name or title in this, you can change the LTI ID in the Advanced settings.

Some systems don't have input fields for the LTI link, key and secret, but only for XML. In that case, you can use the Basic LTI configuration.


LTI Learners in aNewSpring

When a learner gets subscribed to the course through LTI, a user account will be created in aNewSpring.
The first name, last name and email address will be stored and the account will have an external ID. This external ID is used to recognise the learner in both systems and this way they can continue their learning journey later. Once the learner has finished the activity that the course grade is based on, aNewSpring can send the results.

Learner subscriptions through LTI also cost a licence.