IMS Learning Tools Interoperability™ (LTI) is a specification designed to allow remote tools and content to be integrated into a Learning Management System (LMS).

See http://www.imsglobal.org/specs/ltiv1p1p1/implementation-guide for more technical details on LTI.

Inspera Assessment currently supports launching as a tool using LTI 1.1.1, for both admin and student users.

Overall flow

For Inspera Assessment to be added as an LTI app in an LMS/VLE, a set of credentials is needed. Contact Inspera Service Desk to get this set up for your account.

With this in place the following functionality is supported:

1. An instructor/admin can set up and schedule a test in IA

2. A student can take this test without having credentials for IA

Access to the test is controlled by the LMS. By exposing access to the created object, the LTI integration assumes that all users with access to the object should have access in Inspera Assessment (this also covers how student are assigned to a test).

Practical setup of IA as an LTI tool

These steps are for Canvas, but quite similar for Moodle. In the longer term, we will likely add Inspera Assessment as a centralised tool in Canvas (in their app directory or similar), skipping some of the steps here.

First of all, get hold of your client key and secret.

To prepare, set up one instructor (teacher) and one student in Canvas. This can be done via the People menu item, first in general and then in the course assigning the student to that course. If you use the invitation flow, be aware that email invites are actually only sent after the course is published.

Then you go into the Settings section of your course (create a new course if you do not already have one where you want to add IA testing capabilities), select Apps and "+ App":

Open

Below, we show the setup of this for demo.inspera.no (the client secret 123abc is not a real working client secret):

Open

Selecting "public" here, will let the IA side get full personal information on the user, which may often be the preferred way of doing formative assessments from the VLE.

For Launch URL, remember to use https:// your institutions url /ltiaccess

Use of the IA LTI tool

There are two ways of using LTI tools in Canvas, as a normal item/activity and as an assignment. Inspera Assessment support both. We'll show both examples in order here.

Creating a normal item/activity

In the course builder in Canvas, create a module and then an activity of type External Tool. Select the relevant LTI tool type (as defined in the previous section) by clicking it. This will fill out the relevant URL as shown in the example below:

After this is published, you can access this activity as an instructor. Publishing needs to be done both on course level and activity level, the screenshot below shows this last step that can be easy to miss if not used to working in Canvas:

Then access the activity as an instructor. This will bring up the Deliver tab of IA inside of Canvas. Set the dates, select the question set, etc. and activity the test without adding any candidates:

Then a student can access this via Canvas and do the test from there, without logging on:

Creating an Assignment

The process for setting up an assignment is similar to the one for a normal activity item in the course modules, but starts by choosing type Assignment:

Then you select to use an external tool for the submission:

Use the button Find to select the correct URL for your configured LTI integration to Inspera Assessment without typing it again. The rest of the process is identical as above when setting up an Inspera Assessment test as a normal activity.