Moodle and LTI

Ok, a little brain review in order for your truly.  LTI?  what the heck is that? and why do I care?

First, I care because we now have two vendors who are using that model to deliver their moodle content.

LTI is acroynm for (learning tool interactive) - yes, very vague, which means lots of options or LTI services that you can utilize.

On a conceptual level, moodle can act as either;

A LTI provider - where your moodle instance is serving up LTI services
A LTI consumer - where your moodle instance is consuming from another server, its content.

Our moodle site is set up as a LTI consumer.  For each LTI provider that we are consuming from, we have two at the moment, information must be provided in the way of a LTI definition.

Setting up our moodle as LTI consumer.

Define the LTI definition in the External Tool Configuration setting located at Site administration | Plugins | Activity modules | External Tool 

Each of the Tool Names, middlebury interactive and FLVS Global definitions were provided by the LTI provider.  Details are stored in each *connection. 

The definitions provide a map or connection back to the LTI provider server, where content can be found and displayed in a moodle activity.

Course page showing LTI provided activities

Notice the blue circle icon is representative of LTI provided content.  When hovering over an item on the course page, the path shows sitename/mod/lti/view.php.  Clicking on one of the LTI entities shows the content served from the LTI provider.

In conclusion, as a moodle LTI consumer, the course page has potentially new activities available to it.  The activities are provided by the connection detailed above to a moodle LTI provider compliant server.

About being a LTI provider - this is the plugin to install into your /local directory.

This page also explains a lot about being an LTI provider.
This page talks about the local plugin to install in your moodle to be a LTI provider.

The LTI provider plugin uses this sentence to describe what I am trying to explain.  "This plugin allows remote systems users (LTI consumers) access to Moodle courses or Moodle activities"

If I had a resource that was worth sharing between my moodle instances or if I wanted to share something I created with the larger moodle community.  You could set up this plugin, creating security details about your moodle, and share the resource with other moodle sites.  Nice.

I should try this....

Other useful links

Great overview of LTI services

The final a-ha

Finally - consuming LTI complient resources from other web servers allows you, the course creator, to access new types of activities in your course.  If as a lti consumer, I have a key defined on server X to server Y, then when I am creating activities in a new course on server X, I would see new activities that are being server up to server X by server Y.  Got it?

Server  Y is extending the capacity of server X by acting as a LTI provider.  Server X is getting new options by acting as a lti consumer or server Y.  The connection between server X and Y is defined on server X.  Got it?