Managing LTI Course Navigation Visibility

jperkins
Instructure
Instructure
‎04-09-2018 08:26 AM
31
15051

The Story

A common frustration of teachers using Canvas at an institution is when their course navigation gets messed up by an admin. A teacher may have been teaching their courses for a couple of weeks and then all of a sudden, their institution adds a new LTI that has a course navigation launch and it messes up their course navigation in all their courses. Then their students start asking about the new LTI and the teacher has to tell them all they aren't using it and hide it in their course settings. 

272643_pastedImage_5.png

However, the story is worse for those instructors who don't know to customize their course navigation. Before you know it, they have a course navigation list that is so long that students have to scroll to see everything on it (see image to right). Core Canvas tools will hide themselves if they aren't being used (light grey items), but not with LTI's. So now those teachers have their students asking about each new tool and wondering why their teachers aren't using it...

Taking Control

Part 1 - Installing New LTIs

As the Canvas admin, you have the ability to decide, when an LTI is installed, whether you want it to be visible or not. Most LTI vendors want to encourage your teachers to use the tool and they enable it by default. A simple edit can help you avoid the above hassle for your teachers, while allowing you to roll the tool out to the teachers who need it.

When installing an LTI tool, the 3rd party provider will generally provide you a URL to configure the tool. If installing the tool from the apps tab in Canvas, the URL's for the installs can be found at the tool's detail page on https://www.eduappcenter.com/. These URLs should end in .xml which is the format needed to configure an LTI tool. Navigating to these URL's in your browser should take you to a page that looks like this:

<blti:title>Course Wanda Fish</blti:title>
<blti:description>This tool adds a course navigation link to a page on a fish called "Wanda"</blti:description>
<blti:extensions platform="canvas.instructure.com">
  <lticm:property name="tool_id">course_navigation</lticm:property>
  <lticm:property name="privacy_level">anonymous</lticm:property>
  <lticm:options name="course_navigation">
    <lticm:property name="text">Course Wanda Fish</lticm:property>
  </lticm:options>
</blti:extensions>

The trick is to find the <lticm:options name="course_navigation"> part of the xml file so we can customize it a little bit. We just need to add one more line after this and then we can install the LTI by pasting in XML. So here are the instructions:

  1. Copy and paste the XML into a text editor (Notepad for Windows or textEdit for Mac)
  2. Find the <lticm:options name="course_navigation"> part of the code
  3. Copy and paste the following code immediately below the course navigation line
    • <lticm:property name="default">disabled</lticm:property>
  4. Follow these instructions to install the LTI via XML
  5. Enjoy the new LTI being hidden by default

Part 2 - Editing Existing LTIs

If you already have LTIs that are visible by default that you'd like to change, you can do that by using the Canvas API. There is a lot to working with the API that I will not go into on this post, but if you have a Mac you already have "cURL" installed by default so you can copy and paste the following code to update your LTI tools. If you have a PC, you can try and follow the instructions here to install cURL on Windows.

You will need to:

  1. Copy and paste the following code snippet to a text editor
    • NOTE: If the tool has other custom navigation parameters they need to be added to avoid breaking some functionality
      • View the existing parameters by viewing the response from step 4

    • curl -X PUT 'https://<canvas>/api/v1/accounts/<account_id>/external_tools/<external_tool_id>' \
             -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" \
             -F 'course_navigation[default]=disabled'\

             -F 'course_navigation[*CUSTOM PARAMETERS*]=VALUE"

  2. Put your Institution's Canvas URL where <canvas> placeholder is (school.instructure.com or vanity URL)
  3. Put the Account/Sub-Account ID where the <account_id> placeholder is
    • The can be found by navigating to the Account/Sub-account in Canvas and looking at the url. It should be https://<canvas>/accounts/123 with number 123 being the account_id
  4. External tool ID can be found by updating the <school> and <account_id> fields in the url below and then navigating to it in your browser

    • https://<school>/api/v1/accounts/<account_id>/external_tools?per_page=100

    • You may want to download this Chrome Plugin to make the text more organized (similar plugins exist for other browsers)
    • Find the LTI tool you are looking for, the LTI should be a number. eg:

272654_pastedImage_3.png

  1. Update the <external_tool_id> placeholder with the LTI id number
  2. Generate an API Token
  3. Replace the <token> placeholder with your new API Token
  4. Copy and paste the edited code snippet into Terminal (on mac) or Command Prompt (on Windows after you install cURL)
  5. Hit Enter and watch the LTI be hidden by default in all courses. 

*Note, your teachers may have to re-enable the LTI tool in their courses to have access. So you may want to send out communication about this change before you do it.

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