LTI Tool Provider module released

The LTI Tool Provider module (lti_tool_provider) http://drupal.org/sandbox/jzornig/1809350 allows a Drupal site to serve as a Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) Tool in any Learning Management System (LMS) supporting the LTI standard. (http://developers.imsglobal.org/)
Example LTI compliant LMSs are Blackboard Learn, Moodle and Sakai.

This module has been developed at the Centre for Educational Innovation and Technology (CEIT) at the University of Queensland in Brisbane Australia over the past year. An early version has been in use this past semester in a large 900+ student course providing integration between Blackboard and a Learning Pathway tool developed in Drupal. In 2013 the module will be used with a large number of courses and a range of different tools developed in Drupal.

Over the past two months we have made the module much more widely applicable, in that it now has been tested with Bb's built in support for LTI 1.0, Bb using the Ocelot LTI 1.0 + extensions building block, Moodles LTI 1.1 implementation and the IMS supplied LTI 1.1 test harness. Integration with Organic Groups is provided if OG is installed.

Using the module you can add a drupal site as an LTI tool to a single course or to multiple courses (OG recommended if you want students and content segregated by courses. You can add a Drupal site to courses in different LMS systems, i.e. to create a tool-as-a-service or just share a tool implementation between different institutions.

The module will provision users when they first use the tool and can map user attributes to fields on the user entity which is handy if you are using the Realname module or want a surname field for sorting tables of students.

Drupal roles, and optionally OG group roles, can be mapped from the LTI roles.

The module can auto-provision course groups so once a Drupal site is configured as a an available tool by a LMS administrator any instructor can add the tool to their course with just a couple of clicks in the LMS then click the link to launch the drupal tool for the first time and the course will be created in Drupal with their account as the course owner.

Two sub modules are in development, and will be released shortly, that add support for Outcomes and Memberships services.

Outcomes gives you a unique column in your LMS gradebook for each LTI tool link. The module provides an API and an action to set a grade. Grades can be returned to the LMS when a student clicks the return to LMS link, or the teacher can fetch/send all grades from/to the LMS at once. I hope to release the outcomes submodule within a week or two when our testing is complete.

Memberships allows for the full class list to be pulled from the LMS and all users provisioned at once. Subsequently users dropping or Joining the course can be managed using the module. I hope to release the memberships module before the end of the year. We are mid development now.

If you would like to review the module please see the issue http://drupal.org/node/1826496
If you are coming to DrupalCon in Sydney and would like to see it presented and demoed, please comment on my session proposal http://sydney2013.drupal.org/lti-tool-provider-module

I look forward to your comments and feedback.
JZ