Sakai 23 and the Sakai LTI 1.1 Provider

[Charles Severance]

Hi all,

I need to hear from you if you are actively using the Sakai LTI 1.1 provider.   

The TL;DR is that I made things a lot better in Sakai-23 - but might have disrupted how *you* use the Provider and break your code when you upgrade to Sakai 23.

I am finishing up on some nice cleanup of the ways Sakai roles are mapped to LTI roles for outbound launches and how LTI roles are mapped to Sakai roles for incoming LTI launches (i.e. the provider).

https://sakaiproject.atlassian.net/browse/SAK-48085

The problem is that while Sakai has had one form or another of LTI for over a decade, some aspects w.r.t. role mapping have been a little over-simplified.   At some point LTI changed the format, names and naming conventions for the roles.  In the early days, most tools were happy knowing if someone was an instructor or a learner.  Sakai OOTB figured that if you had “site.upd” permission you were and instructor and otherwise you were a learner.  It worked well enough - especially for the earliest versions of Sakai.   Over the years, there have been a few tweaks and flexibility has been added in the form of an  LTI Role Mapping plug in.

But we never really upgraded the default / OOTB role mapping - so some of you might have hacked / patched, etc some of this.

Post SAK-48085, we have a very shiny, capable, and still flexible role mapping by default in Sakai.   This was needed for SakaiPlus because we are going to see a ton of IMS roles we have never seen before (like Guest, Mentor, ContentDeveloper, etc).   While Sakai may not fully support these roles, if we receive them - we should record them and if we then re-launch, we need to reflect the richer set of roles.  

To that end, there is an upgraded realm ‘!site.template.lti’ that as of Sakai 23 will have all the core and nearly all of the non-core roles:

https://www.imsglobal.org/spec/lti/v1p3#role-vocabularies

This means we can create Sakai sites that look exactly as LTI would expect.  And SakaiPlus will create sites that capture, keep and use the IMS roles as if it were designed from the beginning as an LTI platform.

 

So - why the message?   The LTI 1.1 provider in Sakai and the LTI Advantage provider in Sakai (SakaiPlus) share a lot of code (yay!).  But it means I improved role mapping in both of the providers.   My hope and assumption is that it will be awesome and either no one is using the LTI 1.1 provider *or* they are using it without extensive hacks/tweaks.

But one way or another if you are using the Sakai LTI 1.1 provider and in particular if you custolmised it, you *will* need to re-test it for Sakai-23.  And I am sending this message now so you can test in master (in a week or two after SAK-48085 is merged) well before the release of Sakai 23 so we don’t panic after the release.  Lets find and fix anything you need.

Of course if you don’t use the Sakai LTI 1.1 provider or don’t even know we had such a thing - you can ignore this message :)

/Chuck

[alan.regan]

Thanks, Dr. Chuck. I hope that the improvements you made will make it easier for vendors to support Sakai for 1.1 or 1.3 versions.

Most of the LTI tools for Sakai were written with LTI 1.1, as far as I know.  Some have been shifting to Advantage, but I believe the majority of LTI tools still rely on 1.1 at the moment.  Others on the lists can correct me since I am not directly involved with the integrations with our implementation.

• Zoom LTI Pro is 1.1
• Panopto LTI is 1.1
• Perusall LTI is 1.1 (although they say they are working on 1.3 Advantage)
• I think VoiceThread LTI for Sakai is 1.1
• LinkedIn Learning LTI is 1.1 for Sakai (can't get it to work because of Sakai issues, though)
• H5P LTI for Sakai is 1.1 I believe

Not an exhaustive list but something I could Google quickly.

We will be sure to do extensive testing before any planned upgrade to 23.  At the moment, I think we'd go to 22 this summer since our community wouldn't be ready for the UI shift in 23+.

P.S. Let's hope we can discuss roles overall as a community and mirror some of the common roles in IMS standards and other LMS setups to make it easier for institutions to adopt Sakai if they rely on those roles/use-cases like Observers, etc.

Thanks again,

--Alan