What is Platform Notification Service?
The Platform Notification Service is a new draft LTI standard released in July 2024. It allows External Learning Tools to subscribe to notices sent from the platform outside of active user sessions, providing a new channel of communication. This new extension fills functionality gaps that exist with current LTI extensions.
Why Platform Notification Service?
Previously, passing information between tool and platform through LTI could only be completed during an active user session. Once this feature is released (Summer of 2024), tools can subscribe to receive notices for events that occur on the platform outside of active user session. This added channel of communication allows tools to provide content more reliably and create a more seamless user experience with external learning tool integrations.
Committing to this draft standard ensures D2L maintains its position as a leader in LTI standards and extensibility. This standard contributes to improving the course copy process and is required for other long term roadmap commitments (for example, Asset Processor).
Once the initial platform work is complete, supporting additional notice types can generally be completed quickly ensuring D2L can react to future customer and tool needs.
What Notice Types are Supported?
The following notice types are supported by D2L:
- Context Copy notice: This notice type notifies the tool of origin and destination context at the time of course copy. Previously, the copy history was unknown to the tool until the time of launch in the new context, which could create broken content and high priority support tickets during semester start.
The following notice types are not currently supported, but we intend to support it as part of the Asset Processor initiative in future:
- Submission notice: This notice allows the platform to notify the tool when a submission has been made within the platform, this provides an improved learner user experience for plagiarism detection, AI detection and other processing services that will be provided through the future Asset Processor standard. Previously, learners were required to submit work directly to the external learning tool, resulting in learners being exposed to multiple interfaces in the submission process.
The following notice types have no plans for implementation by D2L:
- Data Privacy notice: used to inform a tool when data should be removed for a particular user.
- Resource Link Copy notice
For more information about additional notice types supported by D2L through this service, refer to Product Idea Exchange portal.
Who Supports Platform Notification Service?
The availability of this draft standard is limited to working group members within the 1Edtech working group. Tool partners include Atomic Jolt, Copyleaks, and Harmonize (42 Lines).
How do I get access to this LTI extension?
Customers who integrate with tools who support platform notification service can benefit from this standard by enabling the extension at registration and deployment and ensuring the deployment is shared where this service is needed. This is similar to other LTI extensions. The benefit will be passively seen through more reliable content after course copy.