Stop LTI links breaking when copied to new LMS courses
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Martin Hill
We are finding a large proportion (20%) of all of our recording viewings are coming from public links (VOD-Institution) because of the problem with LTI links breaking when the content of LMS courses is copied to new LMS courses each study period. So our users are all using public links instead so they don't have to re-link hundreds of individual LTI links every semester. This means 1 in 5 recording viewings are not being captured by course analytics which quite frustratingly messes up student engagement stats for all these courses.
It's great to see section public links now have an authentication option, but most recordings that get re-used every semester are individual recording links so we really need these to have the option of
section-based
authentication so that they show up in the class analytics.Even better though would be if it was possible for LTI Echo links to be copied from one LMS course to another without breaking since only these include both video tracks and presentation tracks and do seamless authentication pass-thrugh. Public links in contrast are only video and require a separate login even when embedded in an LMS course.
I know the LTI standard itself might be the major problem here, so maybe a Blackboard Building Block is the only solution to this need?
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Steven Nagel
For what its worth, we don't see this issue when copying from canvas course to canvas course; however, our Echo LTI is only on in the colleges who use Echo so that means we have to make sure that all courses we want to migrate to are already in our canvas subaccount.
Echo Team
Hi Marty, thanks so much for the feedback! As we move towards implementing both Folders as well as LTI 1.3 support over the course of this year (currently slotted in Q2) we plan to tackle this issue with links not surviving the course copy.
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Tony Iraia
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Andrew Gates
I was expecting to find a feature request for this as I knew we couldn't be alone in experiencing this issue. However I'm surprised at how few votes this request has received.
Due to this issue, I'll be manually relinking over 400 videos as part of our 2018 end-of-year page rollovers in Moodle, and expect to be relinking more than this in each future year until it is resolved as part of natural growth in use of ALP by staff.
(In September, we had already manually relinked around 500 of the same videos after they'd been successfully migrated to ALP as part of decommissioning our ESS server.)
I‘m not sure I understand the design of LTI in terms of linking to unique external content.
Outside the Echo context, I’d have imagined that as a teacher if I linked to an external resource via LTI off an LMS page, and planned to reuse that resource from one offering of a subject to another, that I’d intend students to still see this same resource each time.
My initial assumptions about Moodle backups were thus that it would be easy to relink to resources made available via LTI because the specific IDs for/URLs to the resource would be recorded in the backup file, and wouldn’t require manipulation on restore.
To design the restore process so that it creates a new LTI activity that points to nothing or perhaps increments a resource ID thus seems strange.
I can understand that in a classroom capture context, for each new offering of a subject the classroom session to be pointed to is likely to change each year.
However this doesn’t account for other types of content that could be linked to in ALP, ie content that doesn’t change from offering to offering for a subject.
In the case of Moodle, I’d suggest it would be easier for staff to have a persistent link to an existing classroom capture, and then just duplicate this link in Moodle to create a new icon which can be linked to a new capture as these captures are progressively created across the year.
The previous link can be used as a reference point (eg to relevant ALP courses and sections) and then deleted if no longer required.
One solution I saw suggested on the Moodle HQ forum pages was to reuse the same Moodle course page and so avoid the issue of broken links.
However, in my experience it’s an unusual approach to LMS course management to plan to use the same course page for a subject in perpetuity and swap students in and out of it for each offering.
And for us this is not practical - in Moodle’s case this would remove all logs of student activity, and student assignments and related grades would have to be cleared out each time (which also means marking of all student assignments and grading/regrading would need to be finalised before rollover).
It would provide no record of teaching activity for audit purposes, and it also removes the opportunity to record what teaching content was provided to what students at a given point in time.
It would also mean that students are denied the opportunity to revisit previous learning materials for revision purposes, so only ever see a year’s worth of course content etc.
So I’m surprised that the need to manually relink multiple videos would be considered an inevitable part of LMS course management due to using Echo.
We’re only a relatively small institution, and while universities typically have greater staffing ratios, I imagine they would also consider it suboptimal to require manual relinking across multiple subject pages for multiple qualification offered.
Perhaps as part of any rethink of Echo integration via LTI, the option to either maintain or break existing links to ALP videos could be an option on the Reset screen in Moodle (with my suggestion being that the default be not to break!), else maybe a checkbox in the Restore screen itself??
Btw if memory serves, this wasn’t an issue 12 months ago.
Am hoping a feasible fix might be found quickly.
Thanks
Mikee Elliott
AFAIK, the LTI standard is partially involved in causing this, but there appears to be no functionality to pass back the targeted entity to the LMS platform. Currently, the unique ID of the LTI link is passed to Echo, where the target is assigned and kept. On rollover, each activity is copied... so gets a new ID. This no longer lines up with any record kept in the Echo db, so it requires manual intervention.
This is a tricky one, as we'd like some of our links to stay as they are, and others to be flagged for update, as we're still in an 18-month-lifecycle model. Moving on from this model will run us up against this issue, where more permanent assets have to be re-linked each time a subject is delivered.