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Copying an LMS course with WeBWorK LTI 1.3

Copying an LMS course with WeBWorK LTI 1.3

by Alex Jordan -
Number of replies: 3

Has anyone had success with a situation like:

  1. You have an LMS course that has many LTI links to WeBWorK. ("Many" because you are using "homework" grade passback mode and you have links in the LMS to each WeBWorK assignment).
  2. It's a new term/semester, and your get a new LMS course. You copy/clone content from your previous LMS course.
  3. All of the LTI 1.3 links still point to your old WeBWorK course. Specifically, in their details there is something like:
      "https://purl.imsglobal.org/spec/lti/claim/target_link_uri": "https://webwork.yourschool.edu/webwork2/yourOldCourse/someSet",
  4. You want to update all of these LTI links to use your new WeBWorK course for the new term/semester.
With LTI 1.1, we had direct access to the launch URL, and that was straightforward to update. (Tedious to do it two dozen times or so, but not too bad with copy paste.) So far with LTI 1.3, I don't see how I can simply change that target_link_uri setting. I can *view* it (as well as all other link request details) but not edit it.

So at the moment, faculty cannot centrally manage these links when moving to a new term/semester. The only thing to do seems to be to delete all of the LTI links, then create new ones to the new WeBWorK course. We'd like to avoid that because the actual placement of the links is scattered throughout the LMS, in various modules and navigation tools. Being able to manage the launch URL (or target_link_uri in LTI 1.3 lingo) form a central LTI tool manager would be much better.

Answers to this probably depends on the LMS. We are using Desire2Learn. (And I've reached out to our D2L admin team, but I don't expect to hear back too soon, as they have a lot going on this time of year.)
In reply to Alex Jordan

Re: Copying an LMS course with WeBWorK LTI 1.3

by Andras Balogh -
This is not an answer to your question, but may I ask why you are creating new WeBWorK courses for new semesters? Why don't you reuse the previous semester's WeBWorK course, delete previous students, and update set deadlines?
In reply to Andras Balogh

Re: Copying an LMS course with WeBWorK LTI 1.3

by Alex Jordan -
There are several reasons why we don't do that. I'll mention a few.


If the name of the WeBWorK course does not change, a student with late access to last term's LMS for various reasons could enter this term's WeBWorK course and cause confusion for themselves and the instructor. Also they may legitimately need access to last term's WW course to complete some work.

We have over 100 instructors, with multiple sections of the same course. Course names need to be distinguished. Even one instructor sometimes wants multiple WW courses within a term. And sometimes you have a new instructor inheriting a copy of another instructors LMS course. So how you distinguish WW courses by name, it often makes no sense to keep the exact same course name.

We keep the archive files with the original WW course names, to preserve student data. Not changing we course names from term to term would mess with that.

In reply to Alex Jordan

Re: Copying an LMS course with WeBWorK LTI 1.3

by Alex Jordan -

This turns out to be easy to do in D2L, but I was deceived by part of the D2L user interface.

In D2L when you go to the External Learning Tools manager (from Course Admin) all of the LTI links are there. They are clickable, and also there is a dropdown menu to the side. The dropdown menu lets you see the details of the request or delete the link. I assumed actually clicking the LTI link would execute it, but that actually takes you to an edit page where you can edit the launch URL.

So while our courses typically have two dozen of these links, it is not so bad to visit all of them here in the ELT manager and make the small requisite change.