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LTI Spotlight Series: LTI Tools and Best Practices

Announcing a new LTI Spotlight Series

Our industry rose to the challenge this spring, implementing emergency remote teaching and moving content and learning resources online overnight. This summer, many institutions and school districts are taking the opportunity to catch their breath and gear up for fall.

Here at Unicon, we are looking for ways to help educate and share best practices with our clients. We are starting a new series called “LTI Spotlight,” where we find and showcase different examples of what people are doing with LTI, the Learning Tools Interoperability ® (LTI ®) standard from IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS).

Martin Lenord slide

To kick off our series, I’m thrilled to feature my friend Martin Lenord of Turnitin. Martin co-chairs the LTI Working Group and has developed several example tools demonstrating the features of LTI 1.3 and LTI Advantage.

In this series, Martin demonstrates how to convert a standalone tool to adopt the IMS standards for LTI 1.3 and LTI Advantage certification using a set of open-source PHP libraries. We will be releasing Martin’s coding session over 5 segments, with each segment building on the previous segments. Each segment will be posted on our Unicon YouTube channel, starting with the first segment here.

Now Available: Build A Tool With Martin Lenord—Part 5 - Group Service

IMS recently announced that LTI 1.1 tool certifications would be extended by a year, so there is some breathing room for tools to move ahead to LTI 1.3/Advantage. With summer upon us, it might be useful for developers to explore this newer version of LTI as a form of professional development. One of the biggest takeaways for me personally is just how useful and powerful having a reusable code library can be for developing LTI integrations across multiple LTI tools.

It is more important than ever to make EdTech integrations easier to save time for instructors and avoid delays during the critical back to school rush. The services and capabilities provided by LTI 1.3/Advantage can support this and provide your users with deeper integrations and a richer learning experience.

We would love your feedback and input on this series and welcome ideas for future guests!

Additional LTI Tools Resources:

LTI Spotlight Showcase

Series 1: Build A Tool With Martin Lenord

Build A Tool With Martin Lenord—Part 1 - LTI 1.3 Launch
Build A Tool With Martin Lenord—Part 2 - Deep Linking
Build A Tool With Martin Lenord—Part 3 - Assignment & Grades Service|
Build A Tool With Martin Lenord—Part 4 - Names & Roles Provisioning Service
Build A Tool With Martin Lenord—Part 5 - Group Service

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Linda Feng

Linda Feng

Software Architect
Linda Feng is a Principal Software Architect at Unicon, Inc., a leading provider of education technology consulting and digital services. Linda has deep experience in student information systems (SIS) integration, open standards, and big data/ learning analytics, most recently as Senior Product Manager for Canvas SIS Integrations and Canvas Data at Instructure. Prior to Instructure, Linda held the position of software architect for Oracle's Student Products Division. In the last several years, she served as co-chair of the IMS Global Learning Initiative Learning Information Services & Privacy Working Groups, helping to bring a new Enterprise interoperability standard to market.