LMS/CMS/PLE administration

The Labmanager offers two ways of interaction with the LMS/CMS/PLE. One method uses the IMS LTI standard and the second is a custom communication schema called Basic HTTP and relies on a separate module/block developed for each specific LMS/CMS/PLE.

In any case, you need to log in as a LMS administrator. So in the root of the LabManager, click on the link in the right at the front page:

_images/g4l_frontpage.png

And then, select which LMS you are administrating and use your credentials in that LMS.

_images/lms_admin_login.png

By clicking on Labs, you can see what permissions your LMS have. If you want to get more permissions, contact the LabManager administrator.

_images/lms_admin_list_labs.png

And in the Users panel, you may create other users (administrators or instructors) for this LMS:

_images/lms_admin_create_user.png

1. Basic HTTP

In the case of Basic HTTP, we rely on courses: the LMS/CMS/PLE administrator will need to add the target courses to the LabManager and grant permissions to these courses. Then, when the student uses the plug-in in the LMS/CMS/PLE, this plug-in will inform us whether the student is enrolled in the course or not, and the LabManager will rely on this information to guarantee access or not.

So as to add these courses, the administrator may do this manually, or he may use the discovery system (if implemented in the LMS/CMS/PLE). When clicking on it, a list of courses provided by the LMS/CMS/PLE is provided, and the administrator will register those targeted:

_images/lms_admin_discover.png

The other option is to do this manually:

_images/lms_admin_create_course.png

Once this is done, the LMS can already contact the LabManager requesting access to laboratories. If the LMS supports SCORM, a custom SCORM package can be downloaded from the Laboratory list.

2. IMS LTI

In an effort to promote tool interoperability, the IMS proposed an standard named Learning Tool Interoperability (LTI) that is now supported by different LMS such as Moodle (v2.2+), Sakai and Blackboard. Labmanager will act as an LTI tool provider and allow an LMS to request access to experiments registered in the Labmanager.

Some of the benefits that the LTI alternative offers are:

  • Use of OAuth v1.0 for authentication.
  • No need for extra developments to work.
  • No need for requirements in the LMS side (and therefore, IT services will not need to install anything).

LTI work-flow

So as to use the LTI version, the course concept will not be used. Instead, the LMS/CMS/PLE administrator will create Instructor users, such as:

_images/lms_admin_create_user.png

Once the user is created, you can grant permissions on them:

_images/lms_admin_create_permission_on_user.png

From this point, the LMS administrator will be able to see two self-generated credentials for this user and laboratory:

_images/lms_admin_list_permissions.png

LMS administrator may now communicate to these instructors what are these credentials. Once done, these instructors will be able to use these pairs of credentials in their courses in the LMS/CMS/PLEs.