School Passport LMS integration flow

Global Grid for Learning (GG4L) is a public benefit corporation with a mission to help promote the use of technology in the K-12 education environment. We do so by forming a membership-based alliance of application software providers and schools or school districts.

LMS (Learning Management System), such as Moodle, Canvas, Blackboard, and a lot of others are used for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, automation, and delivery of educational courses, training, or learning programs. Educational institutions use not only LMSs in the studying process but also other learning platforms such as Coursera or Qwiklabs.

GG4L provides 2-way integration between LMSs and learning platforms (Coursera, Qwiklabs) to deliver an even better learning experience for high schools, colleges, and universities.

In the context of this integration, GG4L School Passport provides:

• SSO (Single Sign-On)
• Gradebook sync. 

There are different ways to provide SSO for users. For instance, Google Workspace, OAuth, Azure (Office 365), and School Passport. This functionality allows users to avoid creating new accounts in the external learning platforms, but to use the ones they already have.

Gradebook sync lets the users have an easier experience tracking the results on one platform. With the help of an LTI tool (Learning Tools Interoperability), GG4L transfers the grades of the users from an external learning portal to the LMS. In such a way, the students can access the external courses directly from their LMS and the teachers can see the results in the LMS as well. It is done via deep linking. Establishing a connection between the LMS and an external learning platform over the GG4L Connect data sync module creates a deep link that connects the exact course with the exact LMS instance. As soon as the user clicks on the deep link, they get redirected to the respective course and GG4L School Passport receives this redirect information. During this process, a line item for each user is created. Line items are created for each course (assignment) that a student has. They allow us to track the grade status and transfer the grades back as soon as the course (assignment) is completed.

Configuring the integration with your LMS consists of the following steps:

1. Filling out an online form;
2. Signing of Data Privacy Agreement;
3. Roster data integration (gathering data from SIS);
4. Connecting with the Learning Platform (Coursera, Qwiklabs);
5. Setting up LMS integration with content publishing;
6. Testing SSO and Gradesync functionality.