What is LTI and how it can improve your learning ecosystem

February 17, 2021 By Júlia Verdaguer

The Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) lets you easily plug-and-play a wide variety of external tools, content and activities available online into your LMS.

When planning and creating your online courses, you may sometimes come across an online resource or tool that you know would be a perfect addition to your course resources and teaching materials. However, using content or tools that are not hosted within your Learning Management System might mean that your learners have to log in to external applications, or that it will be difficult for you to retrieve results or grades. 

To facilitate an easy integration of external tools into an LMS – and to make sure this happens in a seamless and secure way – 1EdTech (previously IMS Global) developed the Learning Tool Interoperability standard

Plug-and-play external tools for your LMS

Essentially, the LTI standard enables a secure exchange of information between your LMS and an external learning tool. The information exchanged between the LMS and the external tool includes course information and user identity –  which helps ensure that learners can navigate seamlessly from one learning tool to the other without having to log into each one.

Through LTI, external tools can also securely send back information or feedback into your LMS, for example, the results of the activity your learners did in the external tool. 

All in all, LTI allows your LMS to act as a central point of access to not only the content you create or host there, but also to lots of external tools or resources. By using LTI tools, you also remove the need for your learners to have multiple sets of login credentials for different websites, therefore creating a smooth, consistent and better learning and teaching experience.

You can learn more about LTI on the 1EdTech website or in this video, also from 1EdTech.

Moodle + LTI: Endless possibilities for your eLearning ecosystem

Our open source Moodle LMS supports LTI to enable educators to have a wider variety of tools and resources to build their eLearning ecosystems.

If you have a look at the list of LTI-certified products, you’ll find a wide variety of resources -some free and some paid- you can add to your Moodle site: from textbooks, to Chemistry and STEM tools, to music dictation tools and more.

At Moodle, we support open standards like LTI and Open Badges to remove as many technical barriers as possible towards increasing the quality of education and to keep empowering educators and organisations to create innovative and integrated digital ecosystems. 

The latest release of Moodle LMS is a certified LTI Advantage Complete platform.

Read more about LTI and Moodle in our Moodle Docs: