Adding LTI to Help Menu

[sbeck1]

We have a contract with a third party, online tutoring company. We would like to add a link in our help menu directing students to that website, when they are needing assistance. The website uses SSO LTI. The third party support told me that if the link was available outside of the login page, then the SSO would not work. We have added the LTI link to the course navigation, but some faculty have disabled it because the navigation menu gets so long.

Has anyone else tried to do this or have a possible workaround?

[MattHanes]

I don't know if that would be possible to add it to the Help menu. These LTI tools typically work by sending data to the tool that is specific to the course where the tool is is installed. For instance, it sends information about whether the user is a student or a teacher in the course. There are definitely apps out there that work independent of courses but I think they have to be specifically written that way. The LTI definition JSON object has a field for "Global Navigation" and "Account Navigation" that would probably need to be defined for the app to work outside of a course. That is pure guesswork on my part though.

[MattHanes]

I should add that you can look at all of your LTI definitions using the following API command:

https://[yourinstitution].instructure.com/api/v1/accounts/self/external_tools/?per_page=100

That command usually only returns 10 things so I added that per page part in case you have more than 10 LTI tools installed. If you mouse over a link to the LTI tool, you can grab the number at the end of that URL and pull up the definition for just that tool. Like say the URL ends in "external_tools/600" then the you would do it like this:

https://[yourinstitution].instructure.com/api/v1/accounts/self/external_tools/600

[sbeck1 · Accepted solution]

 @MattHanes ‌, thank you for the suggestions! I think after researching it all, I don't think it is going to be possible to do what we want to do. Thanks for your help!