LTI — Embed Moodle course to Sakai

6 min readOct 15, 2020

There are many LMSs, Moodle, Canvas, Sakai, etc. Many institutions and sometimes, they have to share their data.
IMS Global suggested and designed LTI, Learning Tools Interoperability. The LTI is focus on the communication between two or more different LMSs.

Why is this possible because most LMSs have very similar database schemas and functions.

However, there are two big problems. One is an auth[entication, orization] and the other is to match the data schemas. I’d like to introduce basic operation only instead of deep inside of LTI operations in this article.

Most LMSs support “<iframe>” HTML code for embedding outside data, for example YouTube video, MS Office PowerPoint from MS Office cloud. The “<iframe>” is similar to “Picture in Picture” in a TV. So, if users have opened courses, lessons, or any data, then they don’t need to auth. They can embed their web pages on another LMS directly.

Basically, LTI tools of LMSs use the function to embed other LMS’s courses, lessons, etc by the “<iframe>”. If so, why do we need to use LTI, because to embed another LMS operations, auth[entication, orization] are required for security.

LTI Advantage from [https://www.imsglobal.org/activity/learning-tools-interoperability]

In this article, I’ll introduce how to embed H5P Interactive Video of Moodle course to Sakai LMS because Sakai does not support H5P. It’s not from Sakai to Moodle.

I don’t touch Sakai, H5P, Moodle installations. If you need Sakai installation on your system, then read my “Install Sakai LMS v20.1 with Nginx”.

I assume we have a H5P lesson on Moodle site and a course on Sakai site.

As admin user, enable “Publish as LTI tool” in the Moodle.

a. Go to “Site administration > Plugins > Authentication > Manage authentication: and enable LTI.

b. Go to Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Manage enrol plugins and enable ‘Publish as LTI tool’.

c. Go to “Site Administration > Security > HTTP security" and enable ‘Allow frame embedding’. Don’t forget to save it.

2. As a teacher, go to a course that you want share,

a. Click the “ ⚙ > ‘Published as LTI tools” .

b. Click the “Add”.

c. Type “Custom instant name”, select a tool what you want to share, and choose a role.

d. Look around the “Remote System” section and save method. We will use the “Secret” on the Sakai “External tools”

e. You can see the tool on the “Published as LTI tools” list.

Now, it’s ready to use. Let’s go to the Sakai.

Your course should have “External tool”. If You don’t have it, add “External tool” from the “Worksite Setup > [select your course] and edit “EDIT SELECTED”. You need “admin” permit.

2. Login as teacher(or ‘Become a User’)and go to a course.

There are two location, “Lesson” and “External Tool” which you can put the Moodle “Published as LTI” tools.

2. Lesson tool:

a. Click the “Lesson” > “Add Subpage” and Create a page

b. Go to the page that you created, and click “Add External Tool” form “Add Content +”.

c. Click the “Manage or Install Tools” and click the “Install LTI 1.x Tool” in the “Install Tools” tap.

d. Enter the remote tool information

Tool Title: H5P — Moodle LTI
Button Text: H5p — Moodle LTI
Launch URL: “Launch URL” from Moodle published tool
Launch Key: Sakai Teacher
Launch Secret: “Secret” from Moodle published tool

and save it. You can see the list.

e. Close the inside window.

f. Go to the subpage of “Lessons” and “Add Contents+” > “Add External Tool” again (Step b).

g. You can see the tool in the list box. Click it and you have a “Configure External Tool” window. Save it. There is a link for the Moodle LTI.

h. Click the “link” then it will shows your Moodle site. This is the teacher mode, so it show all page of Moodle. Students can see only the item which you choose.

i. When you check “users” from Moodle, there are some users that created by LTI tools.

j. If you want to change the “link” to embed window, click the “edit” icon on the right of the link and select “In line: in a box in the current page”.