Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Basic LTI in Ares, Ares Virtual Conference Notes

Following are my notes from today's Basic LTI session of Atlas System's Ares Virtual Conference. We're planning to take advantage of Basic LTI once Blackboard replaces Angel as the primary course management system on campus. Basic LTI between Ares and LCMS+ is also likely assuming LCMS+ adds support for Basic LTI.

Atlas Systems Ares Course Reserves Basic LTI webinar

LTI v1.0, released May 2010
  : No support for callback messages from Ares to CMS. Such callbacks are supported in LTI v1.1, but Ares never passes data back to CMS. Data flow is one-way from CMS to Ares:
  : CMS -> Basic LTI -> Ares Web Service -> Ares Web DLL (pages)
Basic LTI points to "responder", Ares in this case.
  : Term "responder" is confusing; it's really a "consumer" of CMS info, but "consumer" is used to refer to the CMS' relationship to Ares? Strange.
Ares config
  : LTIConsumers Table
    : Ares Web URL field designates the page to display (e.g. for different audiences, CMSs. We might want the Ares response page for BlackBoard to look different from LCMS+).
  : LTIFieldMappings
    : Map Ares fields to LTI fields. Limited by values sent from CMS.
CMS config
  : "Launch URL" = http://ares.host.name/ares/webservice/BasicLTI
  : Consumer Key and Secret
  : view all available CMS params with Ares test link = http://ares.host.name/ares/webservice/BasicLTI/ShowLTIParams