Why should your LMS be LTI compliant?

Every year, more and more companies invest in training and development programs in order to empower their workforce and increase their organization's competitiveness.

However, for the training delivered to be truly effective, they need to rely on user-friendly learning management systems. In fact, an engaging and intuitive LMS platform is much more likely to be used on a daily basis and provide an excellent return on investment.

With this in mind, LTI technology enables an exemplary user experience for both employees and platform administrators.

In this article, we will find out what LTI technology is and what benefits it offers to companies using learning management systems.

What is LTI?

Because of the speed at which eLearning technology is advancing and the number of existing training service providers in the market, no eLearning platform can afford to do without learning tool interoperability.

LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) is a global technical standard that allows online systems to integrate with the LMS (Learning Management System) platform in use.

Prior to the development of the LTI standard, connecting external learning tools and applications with an LMS or other training platform required a technical developer to create a custom connection.

With LTI technology, however, it is possible to integrate disparate systems quickly, securely and at a significantly lower cost, without the need for expensive custom programming.

Indeed, the main concept behind the LTI protocol is to establish a standard way to integrate advanced learning applications (often remotely hosted and delivered through third-party services) with platforms such as learning management systems, portals, course repositories, or other educational environments.

Benefits of the LTI standard

 Benefits for content creators

The LTI standard enables educational institutions, teachers and educational content creators to easily and securely export their materials to other LMSs, increasing their audience.

Benefits for course users

The LTI standard allows course users to access separate sites or tools with a single set of credentials, via a Single Sign-On login procedure. LTI-supported LMSs thus simplify the learning experience: all content is stored in one place and all they have to focus on is their learning.

Benefits for administrators

The LTI standard enables platform administrators to incorporate tools and technologies developed outside their own company, leveraging higher functionality and eliminating compatibility limitations common to stand-alone technologies.

Being able to easily and securely access different tools also enables them to increase their productivity and have access to always-synchronized data.

Benefits for Companies

The LTI standard means less integration time with much less work, making it easier for organizations to provide better learning experiences for learners.

For example, LTI technology provides access to large catalogs of eLearning courses that are perfectly usable in already installed enterprise LMS platforms, without the need to capture courses in SCORM™ or xAPI packages.