SSO McGraw Hill digital resources via LTI and OneRoster API

Austin Ewachiw
Austin Ewachiw
Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud K–12 Education Solutions™ General Discussions
As we start to focus on better online integration going forward, I wanted to share my work with publisher McGraw Hill (MGH) and OneRoster/LTI setup.

End Result:  Teachers and students can access licensed MGH digital textbooks via a single click from a Topics page in Blackbaud's LMS.  IT Folks can assign these assets to a user/roster with a single selection from a MGH portal that syncs sections and rosters daily.


Prior, much time and effort was required by teaches to create logins for students to access a third party site and authenticate.  This was a manual process, and required of each teacher and student taught.


I will try to keep the post short from this point forward, and remain available if you have follow up questions.  Steps to implement, as I recall, are as follows.
  1. Contact your MGH rep to "convert" your current access to use the OneRoster API.  (this process replaces access, and can not be done in conjunction with manual user setup)
  2. MGH has a data team that will confirm their portal setup and admin access.  https://access.mheducation.com
  3. BB Core is configured to create both an LTI, and a OneRoster object for MGH.
    1. LTI requires a launch URL and Consumer Key and Shared Secret
    2. OneRoster requires Key and Secret to share
    3. MGH needs your school's OneRoster link (https://YOURSCHOOL.myschoolapp.com/ims/oneroster/v1p1)
  4. Once configured and roster data begins to flow, the MGH dashboard will present any errors that can be resolved (formatting issues, special chars, etc...)
  5. MGH licensed products, and seat counts appear in the portal, and then can be assigned at the user/class/course level.
  6. Teachers drop the LTI object on to a Topics page for their class, and select the McGrawHill LTI item.
  7. Magic occurs
Thanks to folks like Janet Wittenberg‍ Jackie Christensen‍ and specifically Angie Addison‍  for some hand holding with this.  The efficiency gained by this process using open standards is very exciting to see in action.


Austin
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Comments

  • Elizabeth Perron
    Elizabeth Perron
    Eighth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant
    Austin Ewachiw‍,


    Thank you for sharing all your hard work in an well written and organized post.  The LTI/One Roster topic has garnered a lot of interest in the community so I am sure others will benefit from your post!


    In harmony and inclusion,

    Elizabeth

    Blackbaud Community Team
  • John Rorke
    John Rorke
    Seventh Anniversary Kudos 1 Participant Facilitator 1
    Thanks Austin!  I'm actually working through this same process now!  We hope to have it complete by the end of the week.  1 down, several to go... ?
  • Megan Day
    Megan Day
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant
    This is great. We're just now looking into textbook integrations and our HS math department has implemented digital McGraw-Hill textbooks. Any updates since you first went through the process? Everything still working well? Any "weird quirks" we will need to know about? Thanks!
  • Austin Ewachiw
    Austin Ewachiw
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant
    Hey Megan, glad you stumbled upon this post!


    Yes, the integration has been rock solid and is a major relief on the teacher and student account creation/maintenance. As the Admin, I take about 15 minutes at the start of the year to assign eTexts to courses, and because the rosters are already imported they just 'get it".


    Although slightly different, we were able to add SAVVAS (Pearson, etc...) as a SSO which worked just as well.


    Key is to working with these publishers integration teams and getting on their schedule. They get very busy at the end of the summer.


    Austin
  • Sheila Wyer
    Sheila Wyer
    Fifth Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1

    This post was great in getting the McGraw Integration going. There is an option to turn it on for assignments. Has anyone done this. If you do what will flow back and forth? I turned it on but it's just launching the same as topics. I was wondering if there is some way to pass grades back and forth.

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