System Management of External Tools (Enterprise)

Learning Tools Interoperability

Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) is a sign-on standard developed by IMS Global that allows access to web-based resources from a growing number of LTI-compliant vendors.

Schoology’s LTI integration allows these cross-vendor resources to be accessed throughout the platform and viewed directly in Schoology as External Tools.

External Tools can be added to courses by instructors. As a system administrator, you may also add external tools at the system level for easier management of credentials, such as Consumer Keys, Secrets, and other settings.

The External Tools feature is supported for LTI v1.0 and v1.1 content only. There is not an automated way to determine if a publisher is LTI compatible or not. The best, and sometimes only, way to find out if a publisher is LTI compatible is by checking the IMS Conformance Certification website for a registration number.

For LTI v1.3 content, install the LTI app via App Center.

Important Questions to Ask Content Publishers (Tool Providers)

To integrate LTI content into Schoology, you must first gather the following information from the provider.

Is the content compliant with LTI version 1.0 or 1.1?
- Schoology supports both versions.
Do I need a Consumer Key and/or Shared Secret? If yes, what are they?
Is the content delivered via the tool provider’s website or via a separate URL/XML code?
- If via the website, what is the URL or Domain?
- If via URL/XML, what is the code?
What personal information is required when launching an external tool? For example:
- The user’s name
- Email/username
- Both the user’s name and their email/username
- No information is required
Are there any custom parameters that need to be defined? If so, what are they?

Install and Configure LTI Tools

Schoology recommends setting up your tool providers at the district level. District-level installation of an LTI tool is the most effective way to distribute LTI content across a school, district, college, or university. This method also ensures that you have full control over the integration and its launch credentials.

In your System Admin account, click Tools in the header.
Select School Management.
Click Integration.
Click External Tools.
Click Add External Tool Provider.
Fill out the Add External Tool Provider form.
- Enter a Tool Name. This is the name educators see when adding external tools to their courses.
- Consumer Keys and Shared Secrets may be provided to you by the content provider that is hosting the external tool as an added level of security.
- Privacy settings enable you to determine what information is sent from Schoology to the external tool provider. The only types of information that can be sent are Name and Email of the user who launches the tool.
- Configuration Type enables you to choose how you want to set up the provider.
  - Manual (choose this option unless you are linking to an XML file—see further below).
    - Match By enables you to select how you want the provider settings (consumer key, shared secret, privacy) to be automatically set for each external tool in the course.
      - Domain – This option means that if the URL used to add the external tool to a course contains the domain of a provider, then all the provider's tool settings will automatically populate for that item.
      - URL – This option means that when instructors add an external to a course and select the tool provider from the list, the URL field will automatically generate the proper URL.
    - Domain/URL is the domain or URL of the provider. Details are specific to which you choose in the Match By section.
    - Custom Parameters can be set for each provider. These may be required by the content publisher. Each parameter must be on its own line and formatted as name=value.
  - URL/XML (choose this option if you are trying to set up a provider based on a link to an XML file).
    - URL/XML allows you to provide a URL to an XML file or to input directly as XML.
Click Submit.