Removing LTIs from past courses

[canvas-admin]

Hello,

We have been requested to remove LTI's from courses offered over four years ago. To do this manually would be impractical. Is there any api call offered by Instructure to deactivate/remove LTIs from old courses, while leaving them active for newer courses?

This question is only about the LTI's installed at the course level, not the ones installed at the Institution level.

Our security team is concerned about the vulnerability posed by LTIs in inactive courses. Has anyone addressed this issue at their school?

Thank you,
Michael Fraley
Applications Group
University of San Francisco

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @canvas-admin,

I could imaging a few different ways to try to tackle this...  Most importantly for any method, you'll want to check out the external tools api, as that will allow you to both list and delete the tools once you find them.

I think the most efficient method would be to run the LTI report from root account -> settings -> reports tab. With that report, you can filter down to things installed at the course level.  Alternatively, you could use the API to list all courses, then check each and every one for external tools.

Once you know which courses have tools installed, you can use the LIST method of the API to get the LTI's ID, and then the DELETE method to remove it.  

If you're familiar with APIs and a programming language like Python, these tasks shouldn't be too difficult to automate.

I hope this helps a bit.

-Chris

[agschmid]

I just want to add a simple way to find the courses, external tool IDs and using those results in the script to remove the tools.

I have a report for our institution that lists all external tools placed at the course level, with the canvas course ID, the course state, the term, the tool name, the tool ID, and the launch URL, so that a given tool can be easily found.

If you're using canvas data, (and I believe it can be up to 48 hours old, but I'm sure someone will correct me of I'm wrong), you can query on the course_dim, enrollment_term_dim, and external_tool_activation_dim tables, to retrieve only the tools added at the course level.