LTI Integration: Moodle

❗ Parts of this article are intended for Site Administrators at your school.

SOWISO/Bolster Academy has IMS Learning Tools Interoperability to connect to your Learning Management System (LMS), like Canvas, Brightspace or Moodle. The LTI connection will let you sign in automatically without having to insert a username and password again. Those are synchronised with the LMS.

When setting up SOWISO/Bolster Academy as an external source in the LMS, you must share with SOWISO/Bolster Academy the e-mail and name of the users.

In order to connect you also need:

for SOWISO users: https://cloud.sowiso.nl/lti
for Bolster Academy users: https://app.bolster.academy/lti

These are unique to your institution, and you can get those from us by sending an e-mail to

support@sowiso.com.

When creating the SOWISO/Bolster Academy resource in the LMS, we accept additional

custom parameters that you can pass:

Custom parameter: accesscode=class_access_code

This will enroll the student to login into the class that the access code belongs to. You can get the access code in the Teacher menu, under Settings, Access code:

Fill in the access code to enroll your students in a particular class on the platform:

Custom parameter: url=any_url_in_sowiso

This will redirect the resources to the URL provided. For instance, when you want to link to a test with id 3, you could use the URL as url=/content/confirm_test/3

Custom parameter: hidemenu=true

This will hide the top menu in SOWISO/Bolster Academy platform.

With the editing turned on, in the section you wish to add your external tool, click the "Add an activity or resource" link and choose either 'External tool' or a preconfigured tool.

This will take you to the settings page titled "Adding a new external tool". All settings may be expanded by clicking the "Expand all" link top right.

If the external tool has not been configured by the administrator, you will need to have in advance the correct URL, consumer key and secret. These should have been provided to you by SOWISO/Bolster Academy Click "Show more" to access the consumer key and secret fields.

The following settings are relevant for adding SOWISO/Bolster Academy as an LTI External tool:

Activity name - give the title you wish the students to see on the course page, for instance SOWISO or Bolster Academy.

Activity description - optionally give a short description here.

Preconfigured tool - this is how Moodle communicates with the tool provider. If in doubt, leave it as default. If your administrator has made a tool available site-wide, you will be able to select it here:

"Select content" button - for LTI Content-Item configuration.

Tool URL - This is the URL for connecting to site. Use:

for SOWISO users: https://cloud.sowiso.nl/lti
for Bolster Academy users: https://app.bolster.academy/lti

The following settings are available by clicking "Show more":

This is how the external tool will be displayed. We recommend New Window.

Default - if in doubt; leave as default

Embed - the external tool will be embedded in the Moodle course page with blocks and navigation bar

Embed without blocks - the external tool will be embedded in the Moodle course page but without blocks

New Window - the external tool will open in a new window. (A new window or tab will open with the External tool and the old browser window containing the course page will not change.)

The consumer key us given to you by SOWISO/Bolster Academy.

This is the "password" to connect to the tool - it is also given to you by SOWISO/Bolster Academy.

When creating the SOWISO/Bolster Academy resource in the LMS, we accept additional custom parameters that you can pass. See the section on "Custom parameters" above.

(These settings are collapsed by default).

SOWISO/Bolster Academy needs all these boxes to be checked:

Share launcher's name with the tool - this means that the student's name will be displayed on the connected site.

Share launcher's email with the tool - this means that the student's email will be displayed on the connected site.

Accept grades from the tool - if this is checked, the connecting site will send back grades to Moodle's grade book. See Using External tool for more information on this.

An administrator can manually configure external tools in Site administration > Plugins > Activity modules > External tool> Manage tools so that they are available across the site.

A tool may be configured by an administrator so that it is shown in the activity chooser (in addition to the external tool activity) for a teacher to select to add to a course. Its description, if one is present, will appear in the activity chooser.

To register an external tool, click the link. Alternatively, you can configure a tool manually.

Choose the same settings as described in the section above.