Sakai Plus

"Sakai Plus" is an LTI 1.3 / LTI Advantage "tool provider" built in to Sakai 23.

SakaiPlus allows a school to use Sakai as a "secondary LMS" without requiring you to switch the entire campus to Sakai. Once installed, the instructors and students have a link in their Enterprise LMS to launch SakaiPlus in a new tab. In that new tab, they simply teach using any and all Sakai features. In the background, SakaiPlus keeps the rosters and grade books synchronized.

The teachers and students continue to use the Enterprise LMS to see grades, get notifications, view their calendar and due dates. This means that essential student records are stored in the Enterprise LMS as the system of record. Teachers can use as much or as little of SakaiPlus as they like in their teaching. Perhaps they want to use a few of Sakai's market-leading tools like Lessons, Tests and Quizzes, or Conversations. Or perhaps they are teaching a course where there are enhanced concerns around the control and possession of private student activity data - so they teach the entire course in SakaiPlus on a server owned by the school. Or perhaps a few faculty members want to use Sakai and make suggestions on how to improve the product and be part of an open source community that will listen to, care about, and implement their suggestions in a future version.

SakaiPlus has many hosting options. SakaiPlus is just a feature in every instance of Sakai 23 waiting to be enabled, configured and used. SakaiPlus is multi-tenant and efficient so it is possible to provide a free or low cost cloud service that would allow a school to test SakaiPlus or run a small pilot. You can get a small single-tenant vendor supported cloud instance of SakaiPlus from a Sakai Commercial Affiliate at about the cost of an LTI tool. Sakai can be self-hosted by a school using an Amazon EC2 Instance, an Aurora Serverless Database, and Amazon's Elastic File System (EFS). If a school is a little uncertain about their in-house cloud hosting skills, Sakai Commercial Affiliates can assist a school in setting up, monitoring and upgrading their SakaiPlus instance.

Installation Documentation

We have documentation on how to install Sakai Plus into a number of LMS systems:

• Canvas
• Brightspace
• Blackboard
• Moodle
• Sakai

Installing Sakai Plus in to a Sakai installation is most often used for "loop back" QA testing.

Test Servers

You can test a SakaiPlus install using one of our nightly servers as long as it is running at least Sakai 23.

https://trunk-mysql.nightly.sakaiproject.org

Of course nightly servers are reset every 24 hours so anything that you set up will vanish - and if you mess anything up - your mistakes will convienently disappear. If you want access to a server for testing that will not be reset each evening, send an email to plus at sakailms.org.

Enabling SakaiPlus in sakai.properties

# Needed for launches to work inside iframes
sakai.cookieSameSite=none

# Not enabled by default
plus.provider.enabled=true
plus.tools.allowed=sakai.resources:sakai.site

Overall Strategy

There are several use cases that SakaiPlus is designed to support - these can be used in combination depending on the capability of the LMS that will launch SakaiPlus.

• A simple left navigation launch from the enterprise LMS to "SakaiPlus" to make a Sakai site, enroll all the students in the site, and launch students into the site. This is either a LtiResourceLinkRequest to the endpoint base or by adding sakai.site to the endpoint. If you send a LtiContextLaunchRequest (emerging spec) to the base endpoint regardless of tool id, it is treated as a sakai.site request.

    https://trunk-mysql.nightly.sakaiproject.org/plus/sakai/
    https://trunk-mysql.nightly.sakaiproject.org/plus/sakai/sakai.site
  

• A LtiDeepLinkingRequest sent to the the base endpoint or the sakai.deeplink endpoint. This will check the plus.allowedtools list and go through a deep linking flow to choose and install an individual Sakai tool. You can install a link to sakai.site through deep linking if sakai.site is included in the plus.allowedtools property

    https://trunk-mysql.nightly.sakaiproject.org/plus/sakai/
    https://trunk-mysql.nightly.sakaiproject.org/plus/sakai/sakai.deeplink
  

• You can launch to a single Sakai tool without any portal mark-up by hard-coding the target_uri to include the Sakai tool id like sakai.resources and sending that end point an LtiResourceLinkRequest.

    https://trunk-mysql.nightly.sakaiproject.org/plus/sakai/sakai.resources
  

If you have exactly one tool enabled in the allowed tools list (i.e. like sakai.conversations) and do not even have sakai.site enabled, a LtiResourceLinkRequest sent to the base URL will be sent to that tool. This feature would allow you to put up a server like conversations.sakaicloud.org and serve one and only one tool.

• You can also send a LtiDataPrivacyLaunchRequest, SakaiPlus checks the following properties (in order) and redirects the user to the correct URL:

    plus.server.policy.uri
    plus.server.tos.uri
  

At a high level some effort has been made to make it so that the target_link_uri is the base launch point

https://trunk-mysql.nightly.sakaiproject.org/plus/sakai

And the launch message_type determines that happens - except of course for launches directly to a single tool. This reflects the (good) general trend in LTI Advantage to use message type rather than URL patterns for different kinds of launches.

It might be necessary to install SakaiPlus more than once so that it shows up in all the right placements in a particular LMS.

SakaiPlus Tenants

A SakaiPlus server can support many "tenants". Each Learning System that you are plugging SakaiPlus into should have its own tenant. In SakaiPlus, all data within a tenant is isolated (each tenant is a 'silo'). This way you can have a multi-tenant SakaiPlus server to serve many different learning systems. However it is also a quite typical use case to have one Enterprise LMS - say Canvas and one SakaiPlus server for the same school and to have a single Tenant entry in SakaiPlus for the Canvas system.

You can create a "draft" tenant with a Title and Issuer and optionally a Registration Lock. Once you have created a draft tenant, you can view the tenant to either start the LTI Dynamic Registration process or provide tool configuration to your calling learning system.

You can view the documentation for LTI Dynamic Registration at:

• Dynamic Registration

Each tenant in SakaiPlus has a set of data:

Issuer

Issuer is different for each LMS, but it is usually a URL like "https://plus.sakailms.org" - with no trailing slash. Sometimes this will be the domain where the LMS is hosted. For some cloud-hosted providers, they use one issuer across all customers. This field is required.

Client ID

These are provided by the launching Learning system as part of tool registration. If the Learning system supports LTI Dynamic Registration it will automatically populate this field.

Deployment ID

Deployment ID can be tricky. For some systems it is the same for an entire system and is provided as part of Dynamic Registration. For other systems a new Deployment ID is generated by each course. You can set the Deployment ID to * if you can accept any Deployment ID for a particular Client ID. See the per-LMS installation instructions above for details.

Allowed Tools

This field is a colon-separated list of Sakai tool ids like "sakai.resources". There is a special "sakai.site" tool id which controls the availability of the "entire site" launch". A simple default for this is "sakai.site" or "sakai.site:sakai.resources: ...". This field is required.

New Window Tools

This field is a colon-separated list of Sakai tool ids which will be forced to always open in a new window. The "sakai.site" is always launched in a new window. This is typically left blank unless it is known that a particular tool just does not work well in an iframe. Or perhaps you are setting up a single tool server and want it to always be in a new window.

Trust Email

If the Learning system that is calling SakaiPlus for this tenant sends email, you should trust the email address to avoid creating multiple user records for each user in each site. If you mark this tenant as 'trust email', and the calling system provides the email address of the user, multiple launches from multiple contexts will all be linked to the same user within this Tenant in SakaiPlus.

Site Template

This specifies an existing site like !plussite which will be copied to make a new site when SakaiPlus receives an incoming site. This template site determines the default tools that are added to the new SakaiPlus site. The default is '!plussite' unless it is changed using the plus.new.site.template Sakai property.

Realm Template

This specifies an existing realm like !site.template.lti which will be copied to set the roles and permissions used when creating a new site when SakaiPlus receives an incoming site. The default is !site.template.lti unless it is changed using the plus.new.site.realm Sakai property.

Inbound Role Map

This field allows for overriding the default mapping from incoming LTI roles to Sakai roles. See this documentation for detail on how role mapping works and the format for role mapping entries.

• Sakai to LTI Role Mapping

Registration Lock

You set this field to "unlock" LTI Dynamic Registration for this tenant. It should only be set while performing dynamic registration and should be cleared after dynamic registration is complete. If the launching system does not support dynamic registration you will set these manually.

The LMS Keyset Url, LMS Authorization Url, LMS Token Url, and LMS Token Audience fields are set up as part of tool registration with the calling learning system. If the system supports LTI Dynamic Registration these values should be set automatically. The LMS Token Audience is left blank for most systems except for Desire2Learn.