External content integration beyond LTI

[tavish_fraser_x]

Hi,

I have a source of external content, and I'm trying to figure out how it could be integrated with Canvas. So at the right point in the course, students would click a link in Canvas and be taken to this external site pointing to some content created specifically for them, that they can interact with and edit etc. It looks like LTI would cover a lot of what I need, but it seems like the external site would only know about the user at the point they tried to access the content. For this content, there's potentially a long wait to set up the content for them as it has to do some heavy lifting on the backend, which means they might be left waiting for a while for things to load once they access the content from Canvas. Ideally, I'd find a way to know ahead of time that the student is likely to access the content, so it can be "warmed up" for them before they get there. Is there a good/recommended way of doing this? Things I thought of:

* I could poll the Canvas API to look for when I need to pre-provision things (something like look for enrolments, where the course includes module items that are the relevant type of content? not sure as I'm not too familiar with the API)

* Is there an option to drive things out of the external system? E.g. in the external system, the user selects the Canvas course & module item that they want this content to be for, then we can check for enrolments in the course, pre-provision things and update via the Canvas API to say that student X should go to a specific URL to view their pre-provisioned content? Not sure if this is possible as I didn't see anything (yet) in the API that's specific to the external URL a specific student visits when accessing external content.

[svickers2]

LTI offers a Membership service and the newer Names and Role Provisioning Service both of which allow an external tool to request a list of users enrolled in a course.

[karl]

Stephen is correct.

Look at the Names and Roles Provisioning Service which is a LTI service associated with LTI 1.3. Supplemental documentation is also found at the IMS website. What this would enable is a teacher could go to modules or assignments, select your tool and allow the teacher/course builder to search (using deep linking) the content or activity they want the students to interact with. After this is saved and the LTI launch occurs Canvas will provide a url to access the Names and Roles service and you can use that to get the information need to pre-provision or "warm up" that content for the predicted incoming students.

You may need to refresh this from time to time and student enrollments will change, but this will get you a good start and doesn't require using the REST API to obtain this data.

[maguire]

I have used an access token in the external LTI tool to be able to get data about the users and with other tokens even be able to get data from other administrative systems. In this way, the external tool can prepare for a user's request via the LTI interface and can use a wide variety of information about the user, their course, etc. to customize the experience for this user (for example, providing different content depending on the user's program of study and their specialization/track).