15 - LTI [Massive Teaching]

From Week 2 Lecture Videos of "Teaching goes massive: new skills required"
by Paul-Olivier Dehaye
See
https://etherpad.mozilla.org/pr8ZtLXODg
and
http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2014/07/09/congrats-to-paul-olivier-dehaye-massiveteaching/

LTI stands for Learning Tools
Interoperability.

It's a standard developed to facilitate
intercommunication of learning software.

Most websites nowadays are very complex

and they're usually based
on several different separate services.

LTI allows you to play mix and match
with those services.

For instance, for a Coursera course,
as an instructor,

you can say that you don't like the forums

and want to change them to something else.

There's this other website, say Piazza,
that you like better,

and you find has better forums.

You'd like to use that tool, but typically,

you don't want your users to create
multiple accounts,

one for Coursera and one for Piazza.

In this case, what you can do
is to use LTI

and set up Coursera as the tool consumer.

LTI then does all the authentication for you,

so the students only have to remember
one password.

As an instructor, you have to set up some
keys and password,

but then, to the students, everything
appears integrated into one website

and they don't need these extra passwords.

Sometimes though, the effect is not so great.

LTI does not change
the visual appearance of the forums,

so the effect might be a bit odd on the eyes.

In addition, LTI maintains roles.

For instance, in Coursera,
I'm the instructor,

which means I can see more information
about the students and things like that.

LTI knows to preserve that, so I also
automatically have more rights

in the LTI tool that I have installed.

Finally, LTI can also allow more interaction
with the original LTI consumer.

For instance, the LTI tool can return a grade
that will be used back in the consumer.