We’re now working with a third vendor, Edmentum, which uses the Moodle LTI connection. Edmentum acts as the LTI provider, while our Moodle platform, “studentmoodle,” is the LTI consumer.
I established a third LTI connection within Moodle but needed to adjust it with the vendor to ensure seamless content access and transfer from their server to ours. The LTI connections are found in Moodle Admin, under Plugins, then Activity modules, and finally LTI (a rather unintuitive and deeply nested location!).
This brings our total number of LTI-based content providers to three: Middlebury, Florida Virtual, and now Edmentum.
During the setup process with Edmentum, I needed to modify the connection settings, particularly for a “shell course” designated for accessing master courses on their platform.
Adjustments made to the connection:
I first enabled “Show tool type” for creating tool instances. Then, I configured the privacy settings to “always” to ensure Edmentum could send grades and progress updates to our Moodle system. These data points are crucial for course administration, sometimes overshadowing actual student learning—a familiar scenario for teachers, perhaps? But I digress.
After adjusting the LTI settings, I could create an activity within the “course shell” that functioned as a gateway to the course content hosted on Edmentum’s server.
Here’s the activity within the “course shell” that establishes the link to Edmentum’s courses:
Selecting the activity opens a window displaying the list of courses available to us:
Next to each course title, there’s an ellipsis that, when clicked, initiates the download process.
I downloaded approximately 20 courses. The files were relatively small and in the .imscc format. The Moodle documentation provides some information on this format: moodle docs about this format. Another resource explaining this format, potentially Canvas-specific, is available here: What is the imscc file format.. This was new to me, but it worked flawlessly.
Within Moodle, I followed the standard restore procedure, dragging and dropping the downloaded .imscc course file. Moodle successfully imported and restored all 20 courses without a hitch.
Following the download and restoration, my master category, now populated with the new courses, appears as follows:
