Planning for Content Reuse (LTI)#

Tags: educator reference

Note

This feature was a closed pilot experiment. This feature is not supported for new users.

Before you begin work to reuse the content in an Open edX course, check with your development operations (DevOps) team for information about the website to use. At some sites, a completely separate Open edX instance, with a different Studio website, is set up to be the LTI tool provider.

When you create links to edX course content in your external LMS, you can link to components individually, to all of the content in a unit, or to all of the content in a subsection.

As you plan which parts of the course you want to reuse, note the following considerations.

  • Some edX content can be confusing to learners when it appears in the context of an external LMS. For example, in some configurations, edX course discussions identify learners by their internally assigned edX IDs instead of by their usernames. Rather than linking to a subsection or unit that contains discussion components, you could plan to either link only to specific components or remove the discussion components from the unit or subsection, and then use the features available in your external LMS to add discussion forums to the course.

  • Optional edX course features that create groups of learners based on their IDs, such as content experiments and cohorts, are not designed to provide results for external use. To use features like these for your course, you should plan to set them up in the external LMS.

  • To ensure that edX content remains available without interruption, edX course content appears in the external LMS regardless of the start, end, or enrollment dates that are defined for the edX course.

  • To ensure that learners see only edX content that is ready for use, only course content that is published appears in an external LMS.

For more information about edX features that might not be suitable for use with LTI, see Select Content in the Duplicate Course.

The topics that follow assume use of the edX Studio user interface. However, you can also complete these tasks by exporting the course and then reviewing or editing its XML before you import.

Select Content in the Duplicate Course#

To select content in your duplicate edX course for reuse in an external LMS, you use Studio to review the course outline and make note of the components, units, and subsections you want to include.

Using an organizational tool, such as a spreadsheet, can be helpful. For example, you can use a spreadsheet column to identify the type of content (for example, component, unit, subsection), and add their display names to the next column. Additional columns can contain the values that you use to construct the addresses for your LTI links. For more information about addressing content, see Determining Content Addresses.

Optionally, you can streamline the contents of units and subsections by removing components, or disable course features that you do not plan to use.

EdX Content or Feature

Works Well with LTI?

Annotation Problem Components

No

Cohorts

No

Content Experiment Components

No

Course-wide Discussions

No

Discussion Components

No

Text Components

Yes

Internal Links

No

Problem Components

Yes

Randomized Content Block Problem Components

No

Video Components

Yes

For information about removing components, see Delete a Component. For information about disabling cohorts, see Disable Cohorts in Your Course. To remove course-wide discussions, you select Settings, and then Advanced Settings, and then delete the contents of the Discussion Topic Mapping policy key. For more information, see Create Course-Wide Discussion Topics.