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We recently implemented the brand new Microsoft Onedrive LTI into our Canvas LMS.
Everything seems to work fine, however the behaviour is very different than before.
This is what we notice:
- when a teacher adds a file from his/her Onedrive into a course, a Microsoft 365 Group is created in the Microsoft Tenant of your organisation, and the file of the Onedrive of the teacher is copied into a folder "Shared Documents" in that new created Microsoft 365 Group
This means that for each course, a Microsoft 365 group is created.
That behaviour looks fine, but it no longer supports the idea of having "ONE FILE" in your own Onedrive that can be used in different courses. A lot of our teachers have multiple courses in Canvas in which they want to use the same file. To avoid having to change x times the same file in the different canvas-courses, the old Microsoft LTI supports the behaviour to link a onedrive file into different courses. If a change in the file is needed, only the one source-file in the onedrive of the teachers needs to be changed and all students in the different courses will see the same change.
In the new LTI the onedrive-file is copied each time into a new Microsoft 365 group, hence creating x versions of that file in different groups.
While this new LTI integration certainly offers a lot of improvement and (other) advantages, there doesn't seem to be a way to get the same behaviour as before: one onedrive file that can be used in multiple courses.
Is there a way to get that old behaviour back? Or to disable the creation of a new micrsoft 365 group for èach course? Does anyone has similar needs? What are your experiences (positive and negative) with the new Microsoft LTI in Canvas?
Many thanks in advance!
Bert Van den Broeck
Thomas More University College
Belgium
www.thomasmore.be
Hello @bert_vandenbroe,
Are you still encountering this? This is something we would need to do some troubleshooting with so the best course of action should be to contact Canvas from the number under your schools Help page https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Basics-Guide/How-do-I-contact-Canvas-Support/ta-p/389767
Hi @igustafson ,
This is not some problem that can be solved by Canvas Support.
The new Microsoft LTI was developed by Microsoft, thus they are responsible for the features this LTI has. This post is to check in the community wether more people encounter the same need and remarks we have on the new microsoft lti.
Cheers,
Bert
I have just discovered this today when a colleague came to see me to say that their files were not uploading.
I had assumed that the upload link was to a live document in your One Drive as with the previous incarnation.
I have sold this to teachers on the basis that GONE ARE THE DAYS OF CONSTANT UPLOAD/DOWNLOAD if you want to make a change and that once you create the link then you don't have to make changes - thus rapidly improving workflow and also encouraging people not to simply upload loads of files.
Instead, once you have uploaded/embedded from OneDrive then any editing you do on that file in your own OneDrive is not reflected in the link - THIS IS AWFUL! You may as well just be uploading lots of static files..
I don't see what benefits there are to this? Yes, you can embed a file in pages but you then end up with multiple copies of the same thing with no control over version history?
The URL links to the same file are also very different:
The old link takes you to your Personal folder in OneDrive whilst the new link takes you to Sites. Even the SharePoint string is different with one site removing hyphens?
WHAT IS GOING ON?
What makes things even more confusing is that if you click on the Microsoft OneDrive link in Canvas, it shows you your original file.
Surely this should have been explained in the integration - I cannot find this mentioned anywhere, particularly as this was a very strong feature of the previous integration.
My only thoughts are that perhaps our OneDrive integration has somehow been corrupted? This cannot surely be expected behaviour?
As a previous comment mentioned, this is a Microsoft feature. Is there anyone to get in touch with?
It seems that this new tool is designed from the student submission point of view where you wouldn't want them to be able to continue to edit their submission after the due date. If linked back to their original editing would still be possible.
I just want to bump this and confirm that this is still the behavior with the newly released Microsoft 365 LTI app. It's mind boggling to me that this is the intended functionality...
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