LTI  or Learning Tools Interoperability is a protocol that lets LMS tools to “embed” other tools transparently. These are known as “Tool Providers” and our LTI integration lets Thinglink be a Tool Provider for any LMS that supports LTI.

The basic implementation that we have just allows user accounts to be automatically created using LTI - nothing more complicated than that. There is also only *one* LTI client per School, and no individual teacher can use LTI - this is strictly limited to Schools at this stage.

How to enable LTI

First, you must have a School, and the School must have beta permissions (the need for the beta will be relaxed soon, and LTI should be available for all Schools).

Other than that, there’s no setup needed from Thinglink side - everything should be automatic from that point on.

Any School admin should see a new tab on their “School Management” menu called “LTI”. Clicking on it should give something like this:

Then for example when setting this up with Canvas you just copy the key, secret and configuration URL to settings.

How it works

Now, a teacher who has Thinglink added to their account on LMS can add Thinglink as a tool to their course.

Note that Thinglink must be selected as “opens in a new window or tab”, as browser security will otherwise kick in and display just an empty page with no explanation what happened. We cannot influence this as this happens before we even see the request.

When a user clicks on the Thinglink App in the LMS, a new browser window opens and the user is automatically logged in. If there is no previous user account, a new user will automatically be created and added to the School.

Teacher and student accounts are automatically created correctly. The following LTI roles automatically create a Thinglink Teacher account; if the user does not have any of these, the account is automatically a student role:

"Administrator", "urn:lti:sysrole:ims/lis/Administrator",
"Instructor", "urn:lti:instrole:ims/lis/Instructor",
"Staff", "rn:lti:instrole:ims/lis/Staff",
"Mentor", "urn:lti:instrole:ims/lis/Mentor",
"TeachingAssistant", "urn:lti:role:ims/lis/TeachingAssistant