Open edX as an LTI provider with Canvas

[pdpinch (Peter Pinch)]

Is anyone else using the (unsupported, experimental) feature that enables open edX to be an LTI provider?

https://edx.readthedocs.io/projects/edx-platform-technical/en/latest/featuretoggles.html#featuretoggle-FEATURES[‘ENABLE_LTI_PROVIDER’]

We’ve been using it experimentally for over a year now on campus at MIT, and it’s time to make it production-ready.

We have one challenge: our users already have accounts on the production system, and it’s really confusing for user with an account to find themselves logged into the same system, in a different account, over LTI. This seems like an unusual edge case for LTI, but I’m wondering if anyone has ever used it to authenticate to an existing account, instead of an anonymous one.

Peter Pinch
MIT Open Learning

[sambapete (Pierre Mailhot)]

We do. We have been using it for years.

We serve contents from our Open edX instance to a few Moodle instances on campus through LTI.

To be honest, it has been described as experimental in the documentation for years. I wish the old documentation from previous releases was still accessible so that I could point out the “warning” in the LTI Provider section.

I have been asking for years what is the state of LTI Provider for Open edX. Especially since there was only development for an LTI Consumer XBlock through GitHub - openedx/xblock-lti-consumer

You can look at my questions in a few places:

Open edX as an LTI Provider?

When I look at the current documentation on [12.6.1. Reusing Course Content with LTI — Building and Running an Open edX Course: Koa Release documentation](https://Reusing Course Content with LTI) I see the warning that “This feature was a closed pilot experiment. This feature is not supported for new users.” Yes, some of our old archived courses can still be accessed through LTI by our Moodle instance for example, but it seems that new courses cannot be configured to be accessed through LTI. I…

(there is a link to 12.6.1. Reusing Course Content with LTI — Building and Running an Open edX Course: Koa Release documentation who states that “This feature was a closed pilot experiment. This feature is not supported for new users”)
A question about LTI provider support in Open edX

And to answer your other questions, we only allow anonymous accounts.

[pdpinch (Peter Pinch)]

Thanks @sambapete. It’s reassuring to know that we’re not the only ones using this feature.

Do you know if any core contributors or contractors have experience with the code involved, who might be able to help answer our questions about authentication?

[sambapete (Pierre Mailhot)]

@pdpinch When you ask about authentication, are you referring to LTI authentication or the Future of Open edX authentication?

If it’s the latter there are a couple of Core Contributors chiming it.

The future of Open edX Authentication

We (edX.org) is looking to eventually move our Open edX platform authentication to a vendor/third-party solution. I want to share some notes on that plan, and potential consequences, so we can discuss as a community. We will be looking into a variety of migration plans, but the third-party solution is where we’d like to end up. If and when we finally move to a third-party solution, it would no longer make sense for our team to maintain the LMS-hosted authentication system. I can imagine at lea…

If it’s the former, I don’t know. Maybe @nedbat or @giovannicimolin from OpenCraft?