Followup to Stack Overflow question

[Brian Crist]

Hi,

  Regarding this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24192510/desire2learn-lti-link-importing/24206508?iemail=1&noredirect=1#24206508

  First off: thanks for the info!  Somehow right after I posted, I stumbled on the Remote Plug-In article... but it was very nice to see i was barking up the right tree anyways.

  So I'm trying to set up the Course Builder Remote Plug-In sample, and will experiment with that as soon as I get it working; however I wanted to to just verify some other information that I had regarding our integration.  I've been told that D2L does not support loading LTI links through common cartridge files?  I've tried exporting our courses in Blackboard-formatted cartridges, and the structure of the courses imports perfectly.  To get the links working, I've added them manually through Edit Course->External Learning Tools and set up the content links and tool provider which works fine.

  I guess my question is: does/will D2L support LTI links through the common cartridge?  Also, and I know it's premature, but is the Remote Plug In tool that I'm working with be sufficient for building entire courses, or will entire course packages appear with the tool?  I will get it running and probably answer my own question... 

Regards, 

  Brian

  

[Desire2Learn Staff: Sarah-Beth]

Hi Brian - thanks for coming over the forum to ask your follow-up questions. And welcome to the Valence Community!

I've spoken to some internal folks here at D2L, and they've confirmed that your manual process for setting up LTI links that you've brought in via a Common Cartridge import is the current method for taking care of this task. There is no automated way for making this happen at this time. If this functionality would be valuable to you, I'd encourage you to log the details in the Product Idea Exchange. You'll need to sign up for a D2L Community account, or ask someone within your organization who has an account to log the request on your behalf.

As for your questions around the Course Builder remote plugin sample that I shared, that sample is intended as a way to insert LTI links as you're building a course using the Course Builder feature of the D2L Learning Environment. So by using that sample along with the other features of the Course Builder tool, you should have everything you need to build a full course. 

[Brian Crist]

Hi Sarah-Beth,

  Thanks again for the info!  I had been off this project for a couple of weeks as other fires popped up, but now I'm back to working on our integration. 

  So I've gotten the demo installed on a web server that we've got available on the outside of the firewall.  My demo instance of D2L is unhappy with it though, because my demo D2L instance is using HTTPS while the web server we have available is straight HTTP.  I presume I am not going to be able to change either of the web servers' protocols, so I seem to be dead in the water on that avenue (The error I am getting is this: There were 1 error(s) found in the information you submitted:

• Error connecting to http://<test server>/test/: Cannot handle redirect from HTTP/HTTPS protocols to other dissimilar ones.)

.

  I am going to pursue other paths to integration, because I think we're more interested in delivering courses we've already got pre-built than having anyone build them outside of the organization.  We have something like 900 links per course and offer enough courses to make manually adding the links a pretty unobtainable task.

  I really appreciate your time - and I will look into that suggestion for making a request of product development to support LTI links in common cartridge files.

  Regards,

  Brian

   

[Desire2Learn Staff: Sarah-Beth]

Hi Brian - One route I'd suggest would be to speak to the D2L Customizations team. That team can assist with building out custom solutions to serve your needs, including but also going beyond the capabilities of LTI and the Learning Framework APIs.