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Learning Tools

The Learning Tools feature allows you to provide your portal users with access to third-party learning tools that use the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard.

Key Concepts

The Learning Tools feature allows you to incorporate LTI-compliant learning tools from third-party providers into your portal. Essentially, you can use the feature to provide a window to these externally hosted tools. The Learning Tools feature is compliant with 1EdTech's LTI 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3 specifications.

How a Learning Tool is Launched

Before you get familiar with the feature, it might be useful to understand, at a high level, how tools are made available to students. For example, although you can use the feature to make a tool available with only a few clicks, there are always two specific steps that must take place for the tool to become available. Sometimes the second step might take place behind the scenes; other times you or another authorized user must actively complete the second step.

Here is how the process works:

  1. Add the tool—You or another authorized user enters details about the tool into JICS, including the URL and any credentials that might be required by the learning-tool provider. This process is described in the Add a Learning Tool section.

  2. Activate the tool—With this step, the tool is made visible to end users in a specific feature instance. By default, this will happen automatically in the feature instance where the tool is being added (step 1 above), as long as the person entering the details has permission to activate tools. However, there are some scenarios in which manual activation is needed. For example:

    • If the user who added the tool does not have permission to activate it, then the tool will not be automatically activated after being added. In these cases, another user must manually activate the tool.

    • If the tool is automatically activated but later removed, you might want to manually reactivate it.

    • If you want the tool to be available to users in multiple instances of the Learning Tools feature, then you will need to manually activate it in the additional instances.

    The process of activating a tool is described in Activate a Tool. Note that activating a tool is sometimes referred to as adding a tool to a page, or placing a tool in a feature.

    Note

    In addition to—or instead of—activating the tool within a Learning Tools feature instance, you or a faculty member might want to make the tool available to students as part of a Coursework assignment. With this approach, the faculty member can record a grade for the student or, if the tool sends back a grade, the assignment will automatically record the grade. To use this approach, you must manually include the tool in an assignment after adding it.

Functions That Streamline the Process

As you add and activate tools, it might be useful to understand a few functions that can help streamline the process.

Using Shared Authentication Details

Another function allows you to share learning-tool credentials with other authorized users at your school. For example, if a learning-tool provider has 10 tools that your school can access using the same credentials, you can enter the first tool with the appropriate authentication details and select an option indicating that those credentials can be reused for other tools from the same domain. Subsequently, when you or another user adds any of the other nine tools, the credentials do not have to be re-entered.

For more details on this feature, see the Sharing a Domain-Level Key section.