When institutions use both course management systems and learning management systems to deliver courses, students must learn both to read content, complete activities, submit assignments, take assessments, and see grades. Hear how an LTI helped us streamline our students’ experiences while preserving the best of both systems.
Most Dutton Institute courses that host materials using Drupal, our content management system, use Canvas for class communications, assessments and grading, which forces students to visit two (or more) websites to fully participate. Though generally easy to use, this sometimes awkward system may prove difficult and confusing to some students. The most common solution is to develop course materials in Canvas so that students have just one website to meet all of their needs. But for some of our courses, this just doesn’t work. The Dutton e-Education Institute is known for developing its courses as Open Educational Resources (OER), which requires that content be developed outside of Canvas.
Recently, the Dutton Institute, the Learning Design unit in Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Science implemented our Course Content Selector (Single-Page Display LTI) in several of our Canvas courses over the past year. We developed the LTI to enhance our student's online learning experience as well as our faculty's teaching experience. Our LTI simplifies course navigation by streamlining all of the online course materials into one spot for students - Canvas. All students need to keep track of is the next button! The LTI allows content pages, files, linked websites, discussions, activities and assessments to all flow together into one easy to follow stream. An added benefit of the LTI is that it also allows us to continue to offer our courses as OER without requiring duplication of effort when anything needs to be revised or fixed or updated. Our designers aren't limited in their course designs because we can continue to develop our content in Drupal using everything that is available to us. Getting to this point was quite a long journey.
After years of searching for a solution to respond to feedback from students and faculty about the functionality of our two-system solution to course delivery, we finally found a viable solution that gives everyone what they needed. Our solution was the Course Content Selector. It is a Single-Page Display LTI for Canvas that relies on three different elements working together, Drupal, Middleware, and Canvas to display content from Drupal on a page in Canvas maintaining Drupal’s styling and functionality, but without duplicating Drupal’s navigation or scrolling. The LTI consists of two Drupal modules, LTI middleware code written in PHP, and the Canvas LTI. LTI is an abbreviation for Learning Tools Interoperability, which is a standard published by the IMS Global Learning Consortium. LTI allows programmers to integrate two separate systems to work seamlessly together, in our case Drupal, our department's Content Management System with Canvas, the University's chosen Learning Management System. We worked with Penn State’s Canvas Operations unit to launch it for our courses in Canvas in Summer 2018.
The feedback that we received during and after our pilot, confirmed that we made the right decision in continuing to look for the right solution. The Single-Page Display LTI gives students that streamlined user experience they craved in Canvas. Faculty did not need to learn another new system or continue answering navigation questions or worry that student would not visit the content. Learning Designers don’t need to maintain two separate versions of their courses to keep existing page design and functionality. The Institute is still able to offer our courses as OER.
Join this session to hear more details about our journey as we tested several options before we developed and rolled out the LTI in our online courses. Learn more about how our LTI adds value to our courses and how it (or something similar) might do the same thing for yours.