Google Apps LTI - Discontinuing Plans for Deprecation

[KevinMeredith]

After customer feedback and collaboration with Google, we have decided NOT to deprecate Google Apps LTI tool as planned in 2024, but we still encourage you to transition to Google Assignments LTI 1.3 to take advantage of the newest technology and improve collaboration and streamline coursework. As a reminder, no further development will be made on the Google Apps LTI tool. 

You can leverage this step by step guide to help with the transition to Google Assignments LTI 1.3. We will be working to provide more robust resources in the future to help with this transition.

Thank you for your continued participation and feedback! 

- The Canvas Team 

[james_whalley]

THANK YOU!

[Hildi_Pardo]

This is great news!  Too many of the parts of the new tool don't work in our setting, so we are happy to continue to have both!!

[marusak]

@KevinMeredith Thank you for this update.  Would you be able to elaborate on what customers' concerns were/the reasons for delaying the deprecation?  We have been planning for the deprecation and communicating with our campus community, and we are trying to decide if we should still move forward with our plan.  Having a chance to hear what other institutions' concerns were would be really helpful in case there are concerns that we haven't thought of.

[marusak]

@Hildi_Pardo Would you be willing to share which parts of the new tool don't work in your setting?  Thank you so much!

[james_whalley]

@marusak Here at Cornell, our big issue was the fact that the move from 1.1 to 1.3 meant manually redoing everything that included Google Apps as an external tool or embed without there being a clear way of identifying where these uses existed within courses. Any given instructor would have to know where they had used Google in their course or would have to manually check through all of their material. All of the material utilizing the previous integration would have broken June 30.

As Canvas admins, our team wasn't even able to determine the scope of courses affected because we have the Google Apps 1.1 integration set up at the account level and reporting available would only indicate use of "Google Drive" in the Course Navigation or use of Google Apps for Collaborations (which must manually be recreated for new terms anyways).

[audra_agnelly]

Is there a way to turn off the old Google LTI's placement in the RCE? We have staff attached to Cloud Assignments but I'd like to get everyone on the same page with embedding. We do have 1.3 marked as the preferred tool, but the old one still shows up under the External Tool ellipse.

[james_whalley]

@audra_agnelly It is possible for your instance's admins to remove the Editor Button placement to remove it from the External Tools list in the RCE. That will leave the rest of the functionality available via modules, assignments, and collaborations.

[Hildi_Pardo]

Hi @marusak - here are some concerns I shared on this product blog post -- which you may want to scroll through and see various folks' comments:  https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/The-Product-Blog/ANNOUNCING-Collaborations-in-Canvas-A-New-Featur...

On the chance that the above blog gets archived, here is what I wrote:

Our teachers are happy with both tools -- some teachers really like the original tool, and others need the "live" aspect of the 1.3 tool.  (I'm sad we can't keep both).

I have a few concerns about this announcement a and the LTI 1.3 tool:

1. As petern mentioned above, "invite collaborators" also pulls all Observers (haven't tried it myself, but I'm not surprised).
2. When a Google Assignment LTI 1.3 is assigned to a specific section of students, ALL students still receive the document in their Drive.   This is confusing if students look in their Drive, but also, it lets students see differentiated assignments.
3. My experience is that trying to get support from Google for this tool has been extremely challenging.  I can't get "Help" from them.   Previously, when I reported issues, I haven't received a response.  So this really concerns me if this is "the tool" we are migrating to, but Google support isn't very helpful.

EDITED to Add:   Also, our district does not allow teachers to share Google docs outside of our district.  So we can't use the LTI 1.3 integration to link to documents using the RCE.  It simply does not work for us because it requires a back-end setting to share with anyone outside your domain, and our district will not turn this On.

---

Then, someone responded:

Hildi_Pardo  I broke your comment into 4 main points to make sure I could address each:

1. The capacity to add Observers to Google Collaborations is in line with Canvas' documentation about the role of observers here: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Basics-Guide/What-is-the-Observer-role/ta-p/4 under "Observer Access in Canvas" which is why Google allowed for this capability.
2. Google is aware of the limitation where all students are receiving the document in Drive even when it's assigned to only a specific section. They are hoping to push a fix for this out in the next few weeks. Checking their documentation and updates will be the best way to find out more about this.
3. Google is also aware of the issue where the embedding documents from Drive does not work when sharing outside the domain is disabled. They have noted this as a feature request. Checking their documentation and updates will be the best way to find out more about this.
4. We shared your feedback about the support experience with Google and they advised that the best way to get support for issues is here: https://support.google.com/edu/assignments/?hl=en#topic=9069280

To which I replied: "thanks for the update.   With all these known issues and a bunch of workarounds (and no real support from Google (ugh) --  I really hope Instructure keeps both tools for a longer time, specifically until all these known issues are resolved."

AND:

  "A google Collaboration is the collaborative work from multiple students.  Observers should only be able to view their OWN child/student's work, not the work  of other students.' So this is not in line with the role of Observers.   Adding Observers to Google Collaborations would allow them to see the work of other students.

It used to be that Observers could not view Discussions -- can Observers see the discussions posts of other students??   If this changed, I don't recall being informed of this, and this becomes a huge privacy issue."

[marusak]

@james_whalley and @Hildi_Pardo Thank you so much for sharing!

[KymBender]

Thank you for delaying this.

Feedback from our institution:

1) Help us identify content that is currently linked with Google Apps LTI to make it easy to replace

2) Allow us to disable the Originality option. Our institution utilizes plagiarism checkers other than Google Originality and it muddies the waters to have a free trial for another checker available at assignment creation

3) Allow us to disable the Google Assignment grading type option

4) Make it straightforward to get support for this integration. When we've tried to get support and answers, we've found a surprisingly small amount of documentation. Canvas support pointed us to Google for answers, while Google pointed us right back to Canvas. 

[james_whalley]

@KymBender For #2 and #3, the issue comes down to the new integration being a Google product. Therefore, any desired functionality would need to be taken up with them. As for #4, that's a cluster because the old app was from Instructure and the new app is from Google, so there has been a lot of back and forth over who is supposed to be supporting what on this. I agree with your point in #1 and we are working with our CSM to try and get further information regarding users of the original integration.

[dbrace]

Our institution has not enabled either Google Apps LTI 1.1 or Google Assignments LTI 1.3.  Part of the reason is because we have a lot of dual enrollment (high school) users that tend to use that Google account instead of our own institution's Google account or a personal Google account.

If Canvas provided the ability to allow-only specific domains (we have a faculty+staff domain and a student domain, plus we could consider working with our dual enrollment partners to include their domain), we would consider adding Google Assignments.

[marusak]

Hello everyone, 

What is the best way to report an issue that we are experiencing with Google Assignments LTI 1.3?  We are currently unable to create Google Drive (LTI 1.3) Collaborations in Canvas while using the Google Chrome browser.  It works fine when we use Firefox.  In Google Chrome, when we click on the Create button in the confirmation window, it says that it is creating the collaboration and not to close the window.  But then it just takes us back to the previous screen (the Create new Collaboration page) and does not create the collaboration in the Canvas course.  It is kind of an endless loop. 

We are concerned about this because we have been encouraging our campus community to transition to Google Assignments LTI 1.3 and don't want them to have issues with Collaborations.

Thank you so much.

[adam_c_voyton]

We're planning to enable the Microsoft OneDrive LTI as the same time we disable the Google LTI later this year. 

[SageFreeman]

At the beginning of this school year we followed the advice from Google to hide the LTI 1.1 tool placement and install the Google Assignments LTI 1.3 tool in Canvas so that instructors would begin adopting the new tool, but also allow continued use of the old tool until we near the scheduled deprecation date. 

We were preparing for the deprecation of the Google Apps LTI tool scheduled for June 30th, 2024 which was announced last July by Instructure. However, we just discovered this new announcement with plans to discontinue the deprecation. Does this mean the old tool will continue to function indefinitely or will there eventually be a deprecation date?

Based on this new information, it seems best for our college to draw our own line in the sand to determine when it's best to remove the old tool from our Canvas instance.

[sblanc]

Our school will be extremely relieved about this news. What is the new estimated date of deprecation? Thank you! 

[james_whalley]

@sblanc It is my understanding that Google and Instructure are still working through this to ensure the transition will be smooth for folks. At this time there is not a new deprecation date.

[sblanc]

Thank you!