Announcing LTI Advantage for Blackboard Learn

We are excited to announce our certification for the LTI Advantage open standard in Blackboard Learn. Just over a year ago, we embarked on this endeavor with the standards community, academic institutions, and other technology providers to define and implement this new specification for integrating learning tools into an educational ecosystem. Our commitment to IMS Global Learning Consortium® standards has never been stronger, and by being one of the first to certify for LTI Advantage we hope to emphasize to you, our partners and clients, the importance of this work. 

The adoption of open standards for education technology can have a direct impact on learner success and academic innovation. This impact comes in making it simpler to create new tools, teaching approaches, and solutions that can have an impact inside and out of the classroom. This approach is a key foundation of our EdTech Platform strategy. 

Here are a few of the things our teams, partners, and clients are excited about with the new LTI Advantage capabilities:

• Deployment simplification for tool developers– Open standards make it easier for developers to create their tool once and manage many integrations. With standards and REST APIs as our modern integration frameworks for our EdTech Platform, LTI Advantage is an important foundation for our partners and developers as they transition from the older, proprietary Building Blocks integration framework.  
• Improvements in security over prior LTI implementations – Protecting learner information and securing institutional environments are taken seriously here at Blackboard, so the use of modern security practices in LTI Advantage is a welcomed addition and a major reason we immediately got on board with the project.
• Simpler user experience—With Blackboard Learn and tool providers supporting LTI Advantage, students and educators will have a more consistent experience as they try out and use new tools in their teaching and learning.  
• Better for admins too – Admins can expect better peace of mind during upgrades, more confidence in their individual integrations, and worry-free change management.

Our certified implementation of LTI Advantage will be available initially February in Learn SaaS test environments (version 3500.11), and we’re excited for our developer community to start to work with it. For our self-hosted and Managing Hosting clients, LTI Advantage will be part of the 9.1 Q2 2019 release. And LTI Advantage won’t stop there—the specification supports optional capabilities that can be added to Blackboard Learn over time to make it even better, and the specification is more easily extensible, allowing it to grow with the community of adopters over time.

To learn more about LTI Advantage and its capabilities, visit the IMS Global website. 

For our valued partners and developer community, we invite you into a conversation with us on how LTI Advantage can work for you. Whether you are a publisher looking to streamline the way instructors incorporate resources into their courses or you have an assessment tool needing a deeper gradebook integration, please reach out and connect with us in our developer community. 

It’s going to be a great year for standards and standards adoption in 2019!