Integrating Face Up with Moodle is not a project. It is one external tool registration at site level, then a handful of clicks per course. The difficulty is never technical: it comes from the fact that the two platforms use different words for the same things, and that a credential pasted in the wrong box produces a blank screen with no explanation.
This tutorial describes the real route, in the order it actually happens. Register Face Up as an LTI 1.3 tool at site level, exchange credentials between the two platforms, add the activity to a course, pick the scenario through Deep Linking, check that the column appears in the gradebook, then test as a learner. A final section covers the three errors that come up most often.
The general principle and the LTI services involved are explained in our guide to integrating Face Up with an LMS. Here we get our hands into the interface.
Registering an external tool happens at site level, not course level. So you need a Moodle administrator account, or someone who has one. That is the only real blocker on this route: everything else can be done by a trainer with the teacher role on their own course.
Check this first. In organisations where Moodle is managed by a supplier, administrator access goes through that supplier, and that delay is the only one that genuinely matters in your schedule.
The exchange runs both ways. Face Up gives you three addresses: the tool launch URL, the login initiation URL, and the public keyset URL. Moodle will then hand back its own credentials, which you enter on the Face Up side.
Prepare an answer to one internal policy question as well: which identity data does the LMS share with the tool? The learner's name and email address are useful for named tracking in the gradebook. Settle that beforehand, not in the middle of configuration.
Moodle says “external tool” where the standard says LTI tool. It says “preconfigured tool” for the site-level registration that every course can reuse. And it says “launch container” for how the activity displays: embedded in the page, or in a new window.
That last setting matters more than it looks. For the learner to stay inside their LMS with no second login, the role-play must open embedded in the page, in an iframe. It is the same principle as the one described for the iframe integration on the Genially side.
Go to site administration, then plugins, activity modules, external tool, manage tools. This is the screen listing the tools already registered, with the option to add one.
Choose manual configuration rather than adding by URL. Automatic registration works, but manual entry walks you through every field, which is exactly what you want the first time round.
Give the tool a clear name — the one trainers will see in the list. Select LTI 1.3 as the version. Then enter the tool URL, the login initiation URL and the redirection URI using the values supplied by Face Up. For the public key, choose the keyset URL method and paste the matching address: that is the mode to prefer, because it allows keys to be rotated without any further work on your side.
Watch one detail that costs time: URLs must be entered exactly as supplied, with no trailing space added by copy and paste, and respecting the presence or absence of a trailing slash.
Three settings govern the rest of the route. Tick support for Deep Linking, without which the trainer cannot choose their scenario from the course. Enable Assignment and Grade Services (AGS), without which no column will be created in the gradebook. Finally, enable Names and Role Provisioning Services (NRPS) if you want the course enrolments to be known to the tool.
Set identity data sharing in line with the decision taken above. These three services are what separates a plain link from a real integration; their respective roles are set out in our explanation of LTI 1.3.
Once the tool is saved, Moodle generates its own credentials and shows them in a details panel reachable from the tool list. You will find the platform ID, the client ID, the deployment ID, along with the addresses of the public keyset, the access token endpoint and the authentication request endpoint.
These six values go back into Face Up. It is the most mechanical operation on the route and the one people get wrong most often: transfer them one at a time, checking each paste, rather than reconstructing them from memory.
The pairing is correct when a test launch lands on a Face Up page rather than an error message. Do not look for a test button in Moodle: the real test is adding the activity to a course, at the next step.
If you want to de-risk this stage, do it first on a sandbox course with a single enrolled test account. That is what H3 Campus did — their Moodle integration was carried out with the e-learning integrator eLearning Touch', who built the new version of their platform.
In the course, turn editing on, then add an external tool activity in the section you want. In the preconfigured tool field, select the Face Up tool you have just registered: it appears in the list with no URL to retype.
Give the activity a name that means something to the learner. “Role-play — unhappy customer” is more useful than “Face Up”. That name will also be the column heading in the gradebook.
This is the pleasant part. The select content button opens the Face Up catalogue in a window, straight from Moodle. The trainer chooses a scenario, confirms, and Moodle retrieves the address and matching parameters on its own.
No link to request, no file to import, no ticket to raise. That autonomy is what makes the difference in daily use, and we explain how it works in choosing your scenario from the LMS.
In the grade section, check that the grade type is numeric and that the maximum grade matches the score out of 100 returned by Face Up. A maximum grade left at zero prevents the gradebook line from being created: this is the single most common cause of incidents.
Finally, set the launch container to display embedded in the page, so the role-play opens in an iframe and the learner stays inside Moodle. Add an activity completion condition if you wish — useful for programmes that must evidence completion.
Open the course gradebook in setup view. A line carrying the activity name should be there, even before any learner has played. Its presence proves the grade line was properly created by the AGS service.
If you configured several grade lines for one activity, check that all of them appear. Splitting by dimension is what makes tracking readable, as we explain in AGS and grade passback for soft skills.
Use the switch role feature, or better still, a genuine test account enrolled on the course. Switching role is enough to check the display, but it sometimes gives misleading results on grade passback: a real test account removes the doubt.
Check four things: the role-play opens in the page without asking for credentials again, the conversation starts, the debrief appears at the end, and the score shows up in the gradebook moments later.
From their point of view, nothing has changed. They click an activity in their course, exactly as they would for an assignment, and the role-play starts in the page. No account to create, no application to install, no tab to manage.
That continuity is not cosmetic: every break in the journey costs participants. It is one of the points where the LMS alone shows its limits on relational skills, as we develop in why the LMS alone is not enough.
Nine times out of ten, a URL has been mistyped. Go back to the launch URL, the login initiation URL and the redirection URI, and compare them character by character with the values supplied: a stray trailing space, a trailing slash too many or too few, or a test environment address pasted in place of the production one.
Check as well that you are genuinely on LTI 1.3 and not an earlier version: the two are configured differently, and a mixed registration fails silently.
LTI 1.3 signs its messages and timestamps them. If the Moodle server clock drifts by more than a few minutes, the signature is judged expired or not yet valid, and the launch fails with a message about an invalid token.
The fix is simple: ask your infrastructure team to check the server's time synchronisation. This symptom is disconcerting because it appears on an otherwise perfect configuration, and often intermittently.
Three possible causes, to be checked in this order. AGS was not enabled on the tool registration: reopen the panel and tick it. The activity grade type is set to none, or the maximum grade is zero: correct it in the activity settings. Finally, no learner has completed a session yet: the line exists but is empty, and that is normal.
If the line exists and stays empty although a session was genuinely played, the problem is on the passback side rather than in the Moodle configuration: that is the moment to contact support rather than carry on changing settings.
The route comes down to four steps: register the tool once at site level, exchange credentials in both directions, add the activity and pick the scenario with Deep Linking, then check the gradebook and test as a learner. Counted honestly, most of the elapsed time goes on obtaining administrator rights, not on configuration.
Two settings deserve particular attention because they cause the majority of incidents: URLs entered exactly as supplied, and the activity's maximum grade. Check those two before calling for help and you will have solved most cases.
Once the tool is registered, adding a role-play to a new course becomes a two-minute job for a trainer, with no technical involvement. That is what makes the approach sustainable across a whole institution, and it is exactly how H3 Campus and the chambers of commerce and industry use it, as told in our Moodle customer story. For the other common platform, see the Rise Up integration.
