The LTI Advantage specification helps to keep PII data (from students and teachers) better secured when edtech products “talk” to LMSs. The LTI Advantage specification also makes it easier for edtech products to work with other features of an LMS. Below are the 3 services that make up the LTI Advantage specification.

  • Names and Roles Provisioning Services
  • Assignments and Grade Services
  • Deep Linking

Names and Roles Provisioning Services

The Names and Role Provisioning Services (NRPS) allows products (read apps or tools) to view a list of users and their roles with a specific course in the LMS. So a teacher who logs into an LTI-compliant app can view the list of students in the course within the tool.

One of the improvements made possible in the LTI Advantage specification is that a teacher can see everyone who is a member of the course, even if other users have not entered into the tool. In earlier versions of LTI, the teacher could only see students in the tool who had also entered into the app.

Assignment and Grade Services

Assignment and Grade Services (AGS) allows tools to send grades and teacher comments back to the LMS gradebook. Teachers can also see who started the assignment and who finished the assignment. Additionally, the service can be used to alert teachers that a specific questions needs to be manually graded.

Deep Linking

Deep Linking makes it easier for teachers to set up different ways for students to access content from a tool. Teachers can use the tool to select specific content to add to their course.

For example, let's say a teacher is using a tool that contains a collection of videos. With Deep Linking, the tool can allow the teacher to provide their class with a link to a specific playlist of videos in the tool. This was sort of possible in earlier versions of LTI specifications – but in the previous example, the teacher would have needed to manually configure the LTI standard links that opened into a specific playlist.

Interested in LTI?

Read these other articles we've written on integrating with the LTI standard.

If you’re looking for a partner to guide you through integrating with the LTI standard, then let’s introduce ourselves. We’re Edlink!