Campus Applications Working Group

Meeting Minutes

Sept 10, 2015

Attendees: Beth Porter, Braden MacDonald, Colin Fredericks, Derek White, Pan Luo, Greg Bruhns, Phil McGachey, Ross Strader, Shawn Milochik, Tracey Schroeder, John Zornig, Joel Barciauskas, Ned Batchelder, Roland Jaeckel

Phil: demoing

first use case: make edx content show up in canvas
second use case: make edx leaf problems available as canvas assignments
new pull request, accepted last week:

non-leaves can be assignments
edx doesn't have a "problem set" concept

edx emphasizes immediate feedback
on-campus prefers one grade at the end
canvas gets an callback as soon as one question is answered: bad
code now detects leaf vs vertical

if leaf, send callback as soon as question is answered.
if vertical, wait until student is idle for 15 minutes before sending grade
15 minutes is arbitrary: some want shorter, some want longer.
15 minutes is a per-server setting
if a callback has happened, another answer will send another callback after another 15 minutes
LTI will update the grade

How to configure in Canvas

Harvard's LTI edx providing site has no public courses

if on a server with public courses, make copies of courses to be private for serving LTI content.

edX user is auto-generated from LTI credentials
Getting the url to edX content:

edX doesn't provide it nicely
Phil has a separate tool to navigate a course export and embed parts of it in Canvas.

it's open source, if someone wants to do the same for blackboard.

Derek has a slightly different use case

students navigate to edx, and then navigate around within edx
UBC will use all three models:

SSO only
simple embedding
navigate to entire course

Greg: is LTI provider code available now? Yes.
Ross asks if it is possible to link to larger than a vertical

Is there docs on edge use?

Yes.

Beth:

edx doesn't have blackboard or canvas running
edx is relying on others to test

John Z: IMS has compliance tests
Braden, demoing SSO

live on edge:

"use my school credentials" button

how was it set up?

edge.edx.org/auth/saml/metadata.xml
the school configures the school's shibboleth provider
visit the django admin for a Provider Configuration
enter info like name, etc
enter entity ID, a url the school admins will know
enter metadata source for the school
finicky part:

User ID Attribute, etc:
URN of saml attributes to use to map data from school to data in edX

UBC sends one opaque identifier, no other personal info

clicking "Use UBC" on the login page takes you to the UBC login page, and then you are logged into edX.
There are other options:

skip registration
skip email verification, if you know
advanced settings can do even fancier stuff

UBC has requiredEntitlements, to insist that the student be a current student, not an alumnus

Questions:

Students can't unlink an account if the put in the wrong email

needs to be accommodated in edx code to be able to override an account that exists but isn't active yet.

Operational issues

When we rolled out LTI, we didn't account for services to get everyone up and running.
We've been taxing our devops team with LTI and SSO requests
We have more experience now
We don't have a great support plan
Can we have a set of features that are entirely supported by the community
Tracy: we don't know what it will take, so can't make demands

once we're using this in production with real courses, then it will need 24/7 support
we need to talk about service level expectations
do we need a pilot burn-in period?

Beth: working with Derek and Phil has been really valuable

they have the systems we're integrating with
Tracy: both LTI and SSO need both edx and the school to be available to support

John Z: edx won't let school teams have admin access to edge
UBC will be running courses soon
Derek: Individual schools could run from forks
Beth: we might soon be turning on SSO on edx.org
Tracy: we might be using our MOOCs as a content repository
Derek: copying content is OK, but the future will be different
Beth: content libraries is new, haven't used it much

could potentially let you build learning object in edX

Should this group continue? Do we want to take on new features?
What's coming next?

UBC needs to map between edx ids and the opaque identifiers UBC sent

Have proposed an API to get that data
then we can write an instructor-facing app that can do a number of things:

identify a single user
download grades, filling in UBC ids
roster re-alignment

Authorization is the challenging part of designing the API
Berkeley is also interested in the identity pairs API

Persistence of the passed id

ensuring that the passed id flows through the whole system into the data dumps

What do people want?

Tracy: how are early adoptions and pilot efforts going? This group could check in on that, and discuss, share knowledge
Tracy: content repository for repurposing content on campus, learning about LORE
Greg: more granular reporting

which students have looked at the videos
also, page views

Braden: OpenCraft and edX analytics are adding per-student reporting
Braden: content libraries can be a source of LTI content also

John Z: what would be the context for the results?
hmm, maybe it wouldn't work.

Braden: Shibboleth federations

a collection of schools that pool their metadata
integrate hundreds of schools at once.
SSO doesn't support that right now.
would people be interested in that?

John Z: yes

Braden: there are 10 different ways to log into edX

as a developer, it would be great to retire some of those

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