Homework Submission Tools

An extension to standard LTI, external tools can be configured to appear when a student is submitting content for an assignment. When a tool is configured, users will see an additional tab during assignment submission for assignments that accept online submissions. If a user selects a homework submission tool, a popup will appear where the external tool will be loaded. The tool should direct users to select or build some piece of content, then submit that content to the tool. The tool will then redirect the user to the LTI success URL with some additional parameters. Canvas will take this information and submit it for the current user as their submission to this assignment.

When tools are loaded as homework submission tools, Canvas uses the LTI content extension to communicate what types of content are accepted. This extension adds the following parameters to the LTI launch event:

When a tool receives these launch parameters, it means that Canvas is expecting the tool to redirect the user to the ext_content_return_url with some additional parameters. These additional parameters tell Canvas what type of content to embed, as listed below. Remember to URL encode parameter values such as url.

Remember, to prevent unexpected security warnings for users, it's recommended that all URLs you return be over SSL (https instead of http).

Possible Redirect Parameters

to submit a file:

return_type=file (required)
url=<url> this is a URL to the file that can be retrieved without requiring any additional authentication (no sessions, cookies, etc.) (required)
text=<file name> this is the filename (required)
content_type=<mime/type> content or MIME type of the file to be retrieved (optional)

examples:

If the launch_presentation_return_url were http://www.example.com/done, possible return URLs could include:

to submit a url:

return_type=url (required)
url=<url> this is used as the 'href' attribute of the inserted link (required)

examples:

If the launch_presentation_return_url were http://www.example.com/done, possible return URLs could include:

Settings

All of these settings are contained under "homework_submission" in the tool configuration