VitalSource has long leveraged LTI® to provide students with access to their course materials.  LTI enables us to deliver content seamlessly to millions of students and faculty across thousands of institutions via their learning management systems (LMS). Thus, we are immensely proud that VitalSource was among the first learning tools (i.e., non-LMS platform), and the first content delivery tool, to be certified by the IMS Global® Learning Consortium as LTI Advantage compliant in February 2019.

LTI Advantage defines the new standard for interoperability between learning tools and platforms, and our support for it ensures students and faculty using VitalSource content will have a much richer experience. As IMS Global Learning Consortium states, LTI Advantage offers the following benefits:

• Plug-and-play integration, which significantly reduces the cost and time to integrate digital tools and content
• Trusted security of student data and results data passed between applications
• Reliable, consistent, and productive faculty experiences with technology
• Minimal technical barriers to ensure that digital services are ready on day one of learning
• Deep integration of learning objects, content, and digital resources within the fabric of course content
• Easy-to-consume learning analytics data to support student success

VitalSource’s Launch product team—led by my colleagues Scott Gaspar, John Lepanto, David Brown, and Ankit Jain—strove to be among the first learning tools certified. They achieved this in close collaboration with Blackboard Learn™ and Canvas, as those industry-leading platforms worked toward attaining their own respective certifications.

We are excited that in addition to Blackboard Learn and Canvas, Moodle, Sakai, and soon Brightspace by D2L are also supporting LTI Advantage. This will enable VitalSource to retrieve course rosters seamlessly, deep link into specific eText and courseware content, and synchronize scores from content into LMS gradebooks reliably and securely across the platforms used by the overwhelming majority of students and faculty across the world.

If you represent an institution looking to leverage your LMS support for LTI Advantage with learning tools, or if you represent a content provider looking to expand the power of your content distribution and LMS integrations, VitalSource is ready to work with you!