LTI Advantage improvements
If a tool implements the grading and submission state handling in the LTI Assignment and Grades service, instructors can see which students have submitted including in the Needs Grading workflow and whether grading has started. Students will have more accurate due and overdue notifications because their submissions will register with Blackboard Learn even if the submission requires grading before a score is sent to the grade book. An integrated tool must implement these capabilities of the standard in order to users to have the improved experience.
In prior releases, tools have been able to request a list of students in a class, if allowed, to create a better experience for users in the tool—this uses the Names and Roles Provisioning Service. In this release, tools can now also request group definition and group membership data through the extension to this service, the Context Membership Service. Tools can then use the existing group data in Learn to create group activities or list filters as appropriate for the tool without requiring instructors to set up their groups again.
Other enhancements:
- Tool providers can now fully own their key set and issue them at a JWKS endpoint in the OAuth2 authorization workflow. If used, tool creators will add the tool’s JWKS endpoint URL when registering the security of an application in the Developer Portal. No action is required for Learn administrators adopting a tool.
- When using LTI Advantage and LTI 1.3, administrators can now add custom parameters for an approved domain. This capability was available previously for LTI 1.1 tools; this release adds support for this capability when using LTI 1.3 and Advantage.
- Disabled users are filtered automatically for tools when tools use the Names and Roles Provisioning Service.
Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) is a standards specification defined and certified by the IMS Global organization. Blackboard participated in the development of the LTI Advantage specification.