“Reflexive” LTIs that Feedback into Canvas

SethBattis

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Seth Battis

St. Mark's School - K12

LTIs are a great way to tie together separate learning tools. But, what if we want to tie together separate parts of the same learning tool? Take a look at how one school is creating LTI integrations that build feedback loops into Canvas, using the API to enrich LTI capabilities.

SethBattis

Folks --

What follows is a quick run-down of what I went through in my slideshow this morning.

First, the tools we looked at:

	smtech/canvas-management​ This is my "personalized" administrative dashboard for Canvas. It's where I wrap scripts in enough interface and directions that I can remember what they do and how to use them.
	smtech/student-feedback-review​ Give students a narrative view of all of their feedback (well, all of the messages about the assignment -- not the CrocoDoc comments) to promote their own metacognition/sense of self-efficacy.
	smtech/advisor-dashboard​ Advisors can get a sense of how their advisees are doing in their courses, check the Faculty Journal, log in to observe them.
	smtech/grading-analytics​ Provide some analytics on teachers' use of Canvas (to measure how we're doing on meeting expectations, flag people in need of support -- or doing interesting and exciting things). I've given several presentations on just this tool in the past: InstructureCon 2014: Using the API for Faculty Feedback​ InstructureCon 2015: Feedback for Faculty​
	smtech/canvas-ics-sync​ Sync ICS and webcal feeds into Canvas course calendars. This is currently dependent on a fork of phpicalendar​ for parsing, which is no longer in development. I'm actively working on bringing it and (its ICS parser) up to date for the coming school year.
	smtech/canvashack​ This is a manager for a (small) ecosystem of JavaScript-ish snippets that modify the Canvas UI. CanvasHack use the Theme Editor's global JavaScript to load a customized JavaScript and CSS file per-user, URL, role within Canvas. Currently the "top" plugins that I'm using are: smtech/canvashack-plugin-global-navigation​ — add additional items to the global navigation menu. smtech/canvashack-plugin-templates​ — allow teachers to define per-course templates for assignments (and pages, discussions, etc.) smtech/canvashack-plugin-faculty-journal — tweak the UI so that faculty can browse the Faculty Journal by course (rather than individual). All of the plugins are on Packagist​.

Additionally, I had a list of resources at the end:

• The tools that I've built to facilitate development (in a LAMP environment):
  • smtech/reflexive-canvas-lti​ — the base for building an LTI tool. Just released this morning. Still needs a little documentation, improved examples, etc. I will be converting all the LTIs list above to use it in the coming weeks.
  • smtech/oauth2-canvaslms — a package to easily use OAuth 2.0 for users to interactively authenticate to their Canvas instance to provide an API token for the tool to use.
  • smtech/canvaspest​ — an object-oriented package to interact with the Canvas APIs (never worry about pagination again!)
• My tools rely on Stephen Vickers' LTI_Tool_Provider package (which should be joining the Composer/Packagist ecosystem in the near future) as he transitions it from LTI 1.0 to LTI 2.0.
• Tsugi.org​ looks like an interesting PHP framework for LTIs that is aimed at LTI 2.0 right now -- LMS-agnostic.
• Some useful resources for PHP development in general:
  • PHPtheRightWay.com​ — if you're new (or old and have bad habits like me), this is a great primer on modern PHP development.
  • GetComposer.org​ — Composer is the PHP package dependency manager (all those composer.json files)
  • Packagist.org​ — the central directory of PHP packages (which Composer references)

As always, if you use my stuff, please feel free to reach out (SethBattis@stmarksschool.org) with questions/ideas -- and to submit issues when something is broken!