The LTI Standard Integration

The LTI standard (or, Learning Tools Interoperability®) is a standard from the 1EdTech (formerly, IMS Global Learning Consortium) that several LMSs adopted to provide interoperability. Products that are LTI-compliant can work with any LMS that is also LTI-compliant, as long as it's the same supported version of the LTI standard.

Google Classroom does not support the LTI standard. G Suite for Education does have a service called Google Assignments, which allows teachers to export LTI-compliant assignments created in Google Docs. However, this service is not compatible with Google Classroom.

API Integration for Google Classroom

API integration allow edtech products to directly communicate with Google Classroom through the proprietary Google Classroom API. Users can authenticate into an external product using their Google credentials through an OAuth 2.0 workflow. Once the product and Google authenticate the user, then the product can act on behalf of the user. This means the product can perform functions, such as

  • sending back grades to the users gradebook, or
  • creating new assignments.

This is all done while the user is in the product and not in Google Classroom.

How to Get Started Creating a Google Classroom Integration?

Google Classroom works a bit differently than other popular LMSs. It's important to understand what these differences are and how to approach them as a developer. To get started, developers need to create a Google Developer account to access the Google Cloud Platform. The Google Cloud platform allows developers to retrieve API keys that will allow their products to securely make requests to Google Classroom and G Suite. In addition, developers may need to request access to specific types of user data from Google Classroom, depending on their product.

Read More on Google Classroom

Here are other articles we’ve written on Google Classroom to help you on your integration journey:

If you're looking for a partner to guide you through developing Google Classroom integrations, then let us introduce ourselves. We're Edlink!