Plan for Cypress release

[Sarina Canelake]

Hi Everybody!

I'm writing to publicize the timeline for the next named release, Cypress. 

RC Cut: We will cut the Cypress release candidate on Wednesday, July 1st off of the Friday 6/26 edx.org release candidate. Anything that must go in Cypress must land in master by Friday 6/26. 

Testing and documentation period: We will allow two weeks for testing and documentation. During this testing phase, the only changes we will allow into the release candidate are bug fixes. Cutting a RC and making the associated vagrant boxes takes significant time, so we want to avoid having to cut multiple candidates if possible. The test period will end Wednesday, July 15th.

Cypress Release: We will prep the final release and documentation, and release it as soon after the 15th as possible, and no later than Monday, July 20th, barring unforeseen events.

We expect the upgrade from Birch to Cypress to involve a bit of work relating to some upcoming changes to 3rd party auth and single sign on. We will document this well.

Please reach out if you have any questions or concerns.

Best,

Sarina - on behalf of the Open Source Team

[Andrea Russo]

Hi Sarina,

thanks for your information. I would like to ask you if open edx will also act as LTI provider in Cypress release.

Thanks in advance,

Andrea

[Sarina Canelake]

Hi all,

In the past release, we have experienced a high number of regressions and performance issues. We are thus delaying the cutting of the Cypress release until next Friday, July 3rd (or July 6th, depending on when we make a release - timelines may be a bit squishy owing to the US July 4th holiday), meaning testing of Cypress will begin sometime the week of July 6th.

We still plan to have a final release of Cypress by the end of the month; the target date is now Monday, July 27th.

Thanks,

Sarina

[David Ormsbee]

Phil McGachey from Harvard can speak a lot more to this, but yes, we'll have basic LTI provider support in the Cypress release.

Take care.

Dave

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[Phil McGachey]

Hi, Andrea

Sorry for the slow reply - I was waiting to make sure that the last necessary PR was merged in order to enable the LTI provider feature.

There is an initial version of the LTI provider currently checked into master. We're running it on an internal Open edX instance at Harvard, and will be using it in on-campus courses in the Fall. A summary of the functionality:

 - The feature is guarded by a feature flag ('ENABLE_LTI_PROVIDER') that must be enabled on the edX installation to turn on the LTI provider.

 - Once enabled, any unit of edX courseware can be embedded in an LTI-compliant campus LMS.

 - Content can be enabled at the subsection, unit or component granularity (addressed by edX course and usage ID)

 - A grade can be returned to the campus system in the case where a problem type component is embedded, and the campus LMS sends the appropriate LTI 1.1 launch.

 - When a campus user launches over LTI, the edX platform creates a new account that is linked to their campus identity. Subsequent LTI launches will use this same identity.

The use case that the initial implementation targets is one where an Open edX installation is dedicated to serving content over LTI. This way we don't have to worry about permissions at the course level (since any content on the server can be accessed over LTI), or about interactions between an individual's existing edX account and their LTI identity. Future versions of the feature are planned to enable regular use of the edX platform to coexist better with the LTI provider.

Thanks,

Phil

[Nate Aune]

Hi Phil,

One of our potential customers enabled the LTI provider feature flag in the configuration, but they are now wondering what is the next step? How would they go about setting up a course component in another LMS? I realize that this depends on what LMS they're using, but how does one obtain the URL and authentication information to embed that edX courseware unit in another LMS?

Your post below has some interesting info about what the LTI provider function does, but not how to use it. We haven't found any docs on using it, except this mention 17 days ago in the pull request by Alison Hodges about putting together some documentation on the new LTI provider feature. https://github.com/edx/edx-platform/pull/8974#issuecomment-122983098

Thanks so much for this contribution!

Nate  

[Nate Aune]

Hi Phil,

Just wanted to give you an update since my last email. They were able to set up LTI provider in the django admin area, and also set up edX as an LTI in their Canvas test instance. Canvas requires a URL and a domain - looking at other inbound LTI integrations for Canvas, it appears the URL should be some sort of data source url (xml for instance). 

They were not sure how to generate something like this from edX.  In any case, they haven't been able to get the integration from edX > Canvas to work. Any suggestions? I know you're using Canvas heavily at Harvard to integrate edX content into your Canvas courses. Could you provide a short writeup of how one would go about this?

thanks,

Nate

[Phil McGachey]

Hi, Nate

Sorry for the slow response - I was out of the office for a few weeks, and then have been catching up with a few weeks of backlog...

I've put up an overview of how we have deployed edX to serve content over LTI. It's something of a brain-dump, so if there's anything that doesn't make sense (or doesn't work) just let me know:

    https://github.com/mcgachey/edx-platform/wiki/Using-edX-as-an-LTI-Provider

I'd also direct your attention to our prototype content embedding tool at

    https://github.com/penzance/edx-in-canvas. 

It's an early release and is Canvas-specific, but it has greatly simplified our own work in creating courses with edX content.

Thanks,

Phil