Assignment Selection Placement

External tools can be configured to be selectable as an assignment during assignment creation or editing. The assignment_selection placement alows course designers (Admins/Instructors) to use the LTI Deep Linking flow to select an LTI resource from an external tool and associate it with a Canvas assignment. Assigned students can then directly access the tools assessment activity from Canvas. Tools can then leverage LTI grading services for a deeper assignment integration.

Note: This placement is enabled by default in Canvas for LTI 1.1. It can be removed by using the not_selectable configuration option (see External Tools API). For LTI 1.3, the placement will only be enabled if listed in the placements in the JSON configuration.

Configuring

For configuration examples and links to the specification, please refer to the LTI Deep Linking documentation.

Advantages

Limitations/Challenges

Workflow

A user must be allowed to create Canvas Assignments and the tool must be configured to use the assignment_selection placement. While tools can be configured to use this placement without deep linking, the workflow described here applies to tools that leverage deep linking with the placement. If a tool does not leverage deep linking, Canvas uses the URL configured at the tool-level or placement-level every time the tool is selected in step 2 below.

During assignment creation:

  1. the user can select "External Tool" from the Submission Type dropdown.
  2. They then choose "Find" and select the tool they wish to select content from.
  3. Canvas then performs a Deep Linking launch request (if configured) to the tool and the user is presented with a tool-side UI to select or create a single LTI resource.
  4. The tool can return an LTI deep linking message back to Canvas with a URL for the LTI resource. Usually this is a URL with resource identifiers in the url.
  5. When students view the assignment, Canvas launches to the URL returned by the tool.
  6. If a resource identifier was provided as part of the url, then the tool will see this in the launch payload and be able to look up and render the correct resource.
  7. After completing the tool-side assignment, tools may optionally return a grade and/or submission. See the Grading documentation for more details.

Now the instructors and students can view the grade/submission in the Canvas gradebook if they were returned!

Settings

All of these settings are contained for the assignment_selection placement: