Many of you know that the IMS LTI working group is doing a lot of great things expanding LTI. All of this is done behind closed doors so you can’t see the draft documents but I can implement and release the features in Sakai early – which I usually do.

Dynamic provisioning is a feature which we have had in Sakai for nearly a year (we call it “LTI Advantage Auto Configuration”) but the actual specification documents are now available for others to look at.

https://www.imsglobal.org/spec/lti-dr/v1p0

The spec builds on OpenID Connect Registration:

https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-registration-1_0.html

This is a great spec as it reduces the copying and pasting of LTI Advantage URLs – which annoyingly have slightly different names in each tool and LMS – down to a single configuration URL and a single click.

The spec has been in Sakai (and Tsugi) for about a year, has been in BrightSpace and Moodle for some time as well. Blackboard is going to build it soon. Canvas has their own proprietary solution for tool registration that works well so they don’t need to support this standard particularly quickly.

This is great news for Tool Developers – it is an easy spec to implement it – it took me about 2 days of coding to add it to Sakai Plus this week.

I should probably schedule a webinar about it. If you have LTI tools, I have open source PHP code in Tsugi for the Tool end – and in Sakai I have both the LMS and Tool end of the protocol implemented and a number of nice Jackson-based POJOs to support the protocol.

If you are working in a language other than PHP or Java at least you have a bunch of working code to look at and lots of ways to test your tool. You can do testing on Sakai’s nightly servers or my dev1.sakaicloud.org servers. I am happy to mentor tool developers to implement this new spec – all of our collective lives get easier with auto provisioning.

To give credit where credit is due, Claude Vervoort of Cengage, a Moodle contributor, and one of the LTI co-chairs put a lot of energy into this spec. So kudos to him.

Let me know if any tool vendors are interested.