Purdue University

Challenge

Designing a secure, consistent online learning environment

Purdue University is a public land grant research university based in Indiana. Founded in 1869 as a college of science, technology and agriculture, today Purdue enrolls almost 58,000 undergraduate and graduate students on its main campus every year across over 200 courses. A top-10 public university in the U.S. (QS World University Ranking, 2027), Purdue is committed to innovation, collaboration and building a better future. 

For years, Purdue has used the D2L Brightspace learning management system (LMS) to enable excellence at scale across traditional university courses, professional development courses and extracurricular activities. With engaging, accessible content and a centralized online community hub for instructors and learners, Purdue has been able to drive growth, support compliance efforts and reduce administrative burden on faculty. 

Alongside the Brightspace platform, online learning at Purdue is dependent on third-party tools such as publisher homework platforms and the Kaltura video platform. The 1EdTech Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard is key to the secure integration of the Brightspace platform with these tools, streamlining learner and instructor workflows. 

“LTI is the connective tissue for our learning ecosystem,” explains Jason Fish, executive director of teaching and learning technologies. “It removes a significant barrier to the use of crucial tools by letting data flow between systems. It means faculty can always do their work within our ecosystem, eliminating manual processes and reducing security risks.” Fish adds that, “when we talk about excellence at scale, the experience has to be secure, reliable and consistent- not just for one course or one department, but for everybody, everywhere, all of the time.”  

However, some aspects of LTI presented challenges for the Purdue team. For example, if a faculty member wanted to link to third-party content in their course materials, the team had to grant access on an as-needed basis and then revoke it immediately afterwards. This created a constant flow of support tickets and took up valuable time. 

“There was also no way to lock down the LTI system for specific org units,” adds Ben Holmes, lead ed tech consultant. “We’re a system of four campuses, and three of them use the same instance of Brightspace. To comply with our licensing agreements, we needed to be able to restrict certain integrations so that they would only be available for a certain campus, or for certain courses.” 

When 1EdTech announced LTI Advantage and the deprecation of LTI 1.1, Purdue University did not hesitate to begin modernizing its integrations and adopting new services that simplified implementation.   

“It was clear that LTI Advantage was the future, and waiting to upgrade would only have led to compressed timelines and increased risk,” says Fish. “We didn’t want to be a laggard and give our faculty and students a worse or less secure experience. At the same time, it was crucial to minimize disruption to teaching workflows and future-proof our infrastructure on our own timeline.”

Solution

Leading the charge on modernization

As one of the first universities to begin the transition from LTI 1.1 to LTI Advantage, Purdue University took a phased approach to its migration, with the first deployments targeted for the lowest-risk users. In the process, the university quickly discovered that some of its vendors were not prepared for the migration, so the Purdue team tapped the support of long-time partner D2L. Purdue leveraged its existing weekly meetings with the D2L Technical Account Manager (TAM) to connect with tool vendors, troubleshoot any issues, and ensure the project stayed on track. 

“The project team met weekly for nearly four years,” says Deb Steffen, senior educational technologist. “Being persistent and just carving out the time to focus on the task regularly was really key to our success.” 

With vendors at different stages of readiness for the migration to LTI Advantage, Purdue designed a roadmap where LTI 1.1and LTI Advantage deployments would co-exist in the same Brightspace environment, giving the Purdue team and faculty time to switch over. For some integrations, Purdue worked with vendor support teams to develop specific migration tools. In close collaboration with D2L and Kaltura, Purdue tested and helped to refine an automated upgrade workflow before executing this migration. This upfront validation ensured that the transition could be completed without disrupting teaching or learning workflows.   

“When we executed, our end users had no idea that 1.7 million links were upgraded,” comments Leo Smith, lead IT business analyst. “There was zero impact on students, and we had no support tickets—that’s how smoothly it went.”  

Leo Smith, lead IT business analyst, further reflects on how close collaboration with D2L’s TAM helped enable a seamless, zero-disruption migration: How D2L’s TAM Services Helped Support Purdue’s LTI Migration.  

For other integrations, such as the GoReact video assessment platform, Purdue was able to use an upgrade tool developed by D2L to bulk-update courses in just a couple of weeks. However, most integrations required links to be updated manually. Instructors worked with vendors to perform these updates, helping take the pressure off the Purdue team. To prompt instructors to make the transition without impacting instruction, the team would gradually roll out new course copies on Brightspace and disable LTI 1.1 functionality by org unit during teaching breaks.

Enabling a data-driven approach

With multiple integrations per vendor and thousands of students accessing links millions of times per term, monitoring the progress of the migration manually was a very complex task for the Purdue team.  

To ensure the success of the transformation journey, Purdue worked with the D2L TAM to refine its strategy and develop a LTI Link Launch dashboard that would support a more data-driven process. The dashboard showed the Purdue team every integration across every course at the university, whether the integration was LTI 1.1 or LTI Advantage, and how frequently faculty and learners were accessing the third-party tools. The dashboard provided both a high-level overview and granular insight into individual integrations, allowing the Purdue team to get a deeper understanding of how the migration would impact users. 

“Purdue is very cautious about making changes because we have so many students and such large class sizes,” says Holmes. “Having insight into the data allowed us to be confident that we were making the right choices.” 

For Purdue, that caution reflects the realities of operating at scale. “The experience needs to work consistently across a large and complex community—multiple campuses, different course designs, different needs,” says Fish. 

By analyzing when courses are created and how frequently links were being visited, Purdue was able to determine the least disruptive times for migration. The university also used the data to monitor faculty progress on updating links and provide additional support for any faculty members who were falling behind.

Result

Evolving ecosystems at scale

With the migration to LTI Advantage complete, Purdue University has secured its place as a leader in educational technology and reinforced its value of excellence at scale. By tackling the transition early, Purdue had the advantage of not having to work against an external deadline, allowing for more time to make it smooth. As a result, the university has now upgraded integrations across 36 vendors and tens of thousands of courses with minimal disruption for faculty and students. 

“The transformation helps to position Purdue with a modern, secure baseline for integrating our tools,” says Fish.  

Working with the D2L TAM enabled Purdue to have input on the migration tools that vendors were developing, ensuring that they were robust, effective, and tailored to the Brightspace environment. At the same time, direct and consistent communication with vendors significantly accelerated the project timeline. Purdue University estimates that without the close partnership with D2L, the four-year transformation process could have been delayed by years.  By helping vendors align their development efforts with the project’s goals, Purdue and D2L contributed to tools and processes that will enable other institutions to complete similar migrations more efficiently in the future.

Enabling leading-edge learning experiences

For faculty and students, LTI Advantage ensures security compliance and supports best-in-class teaching and learning experiences. For example, the LTI Advantage Deep Linking feature enables deep linking for every tool, streamlining course creation for faculty and making the learning experience more seamless for students. Meanwhile, the Assignment and Grade Services feature improves grade syncing between third parties and the Brightspace gradebook, ensuring that students have reliable and timely access to their grades.

Boosting IT productivity

LTI Advantage has significantly reduced the workload of the Purdue team. Administrators no longer have to grant integration permissions on an individual basis, and more efficient grade syncing has reduced the number of support tickets. With less time spent resolving routine issues, the team is free to focus on strategic initiatives. 

“LTI Advantage gives us more flexibility to make strategic decisions on where we will integrate and where we won’t,”

adds Steffen. “We like to be careful with where we deploy integrations, and with LTI Advantage we can default to integrating at an individual course level until we understand the broader impact of a certain tool. It also gives our different campuses autonomy on what level they want integrations to be at.” 

At the same time, the project has helped build trust between the teams from different campuses at Purdue, as well as between Purdue and vendor teams. 

“When I came into the project, I didn’t know anything about LTI, but working alongside the Purdue team and the D2L TAM has helped me build my skills and see how everyone does things differently,”

adds Rob Faltemier, senior IT business analyst. 

With a new foundation set for future innovations, Purdue University will continue enhancing its Brightspace platform with third-party tool integrations, as well as setting the standards for the industry. 

“We were able to use our scale to improve the ecosystem, not just for ourselves, but for the industry as a whole,”

concludes Fish. “We completed the transition significantly ahead of our peer institutions and as a result, we’ve created good practices that other institutions can learn from to be successful themselves. Purdue is always willing to do the difficult work early and advance our mission.”