Documentation / Platform glossary / LTI Advantage
LTI Advantage is the set of services layered on LTI 1.3 that turn a one-way launch into a two-way exchange: the tool can read the course roster, write grades back to the gradebook, and let an instructor select specific content to place in a course.
A bare LTI launch is one-directional. The learner arrives in the tool with identity and context, and that is where the standard stops. Anything the tool learns afterwards — a completion, a score, a submitted artifact — has no defined route home. LTI Advantage defines those routes as three services.
Names and Role Provisioning lets a tool retrieve the roster for the context it was launched from, so membership and roles come from the platform rather than a spreadsheet that goes stale.
Assignment and Grade Services lets the tool write scores and completion back into the platform gradebook, which is what makes an external activity count toward a course rather than sitting beside it.
Deep Linking lets an instructor browse the tool's content and select a specific item to embed, so a course points at a particular module instead of a generic front door.
Access to these services is authorized with OAuth 2.0 client credentials, so a tool holds a scoped grant per service rather than blanket access to the platform.
Grade passback is usually the deciding factor in whether an integration is adopted. An activity that cannot report a result creates reconciliation work for an instructor or administrator, and that work is what gets abandoned.
The services are also independently supported. A platform may implement Deep Linking without grade services, so "supports LTI Advantage" is not a single capability claim and is worth decomposing during evaluation.
QueryTek documents the LTI Advantage service cluster so integration teams can evaluate conformance service by service rather than treating it as one checkbox. QueryTek EBM, the education benefits product these standards are most relevant to, is in active development and not generally available; availability follows product release communications.
