Another acronym. When an IT department or an integrator announces that the external tool will “move to LTI 1.3”, the training team mostly hears technical vocabulary and wonders what it changes for them. The answer fits in one sentence: LTI is the protocol that lets your LMS open an external tool as though it were part of it, without the learner leaving the course or typing a password again.
Behind that sentence sits a trust mechanism between two platforms, a handful of settings configured once, and very concrete consequences for your day-to-day work: fewer accounts to create, fewer lists to keep up to date, results that land where your teams already look for them.
This article is written for training managers and instructional designers. No code, no architecture diagrams. We explain what LTI 1.3 is, what it replaces, how trust is established between an LMS and a practice tool such as Face Up, and above all what you get to decide once the connection is live. It is the first link in our complete guide to integrating Face Up with an LMS.
Your LMS handles enrolments, learning paths and certificates. A conversational learning tool handles spoken practice, a debrief and a progression curve. Two different jobs, run by two different pieces of software. The LMS on its own is not enough to develop people skills, yet nobody wants to run two separate worlds.
Without a shared protocol, the join is made by hand. You create duplicate accounts. You email links. You pull exports to stitch results back together. Every new intake, every new cohort, it starts again. This is not a technical problem: it is a workload problem.
LTI, or Learning Tools Interoperability, exists precisely for this. It is an open standard describing how an LMS and an external tool introduce themselves to each other, exchange the user's identity, role and course context, and then send a result back.
In practice, LTI removes four expensive habits. The link sent by email that one learner in ten never finds again. The second account, with its forgotten password and its reset requests. The enrolment file sent to the vendor before every session. And the results export reworked in a spreadsheet to feed a review.
What LTI does not replace is a frozen package such as SCORM. These are two distinct logics: SCORM carries a module into the LMS, while LTI connects the LMS to a service that lives elsewhere and keeps evolving. We set out that difference, and the one with xAPI, in our comparison of SCORM, LTI and xAPI.
LTI has been around for a long time, and its first generation relied on a shared secret between the two platforms. It worked, but security hung on a fragile chain and the data exchanged stayed thin.
LTI 1.3, also known as LTI Advantage, is built on modern cryptographic signatures and adds three services that change everyday use: choosing content from inside the LMS, syncing enrolments, and sending results back. This is the version Face Up implements. When an integrator talks to you about LTI today, insist on 1.3: it is the one carrying the functions your team actually needs.
Setting up the connection means making two platforms recognise each other. Three elements are exchanged once, at installation.
That is all. Configuration takes a handful of minutes, once, per environment. After that, nobody touches it again.
The learner is inside their course. They click the practice activity. Behind the scenes, the LMS issues a signed message that says, in substance: “here is a person, this is their name, they are a learner — not a trainer — in this specific course, and they are allowed in”. The tool checks the signature, recognises the platform, finds or creates the matching profile, and opens the session.
All of this takes a fraction of a second. Face Up appears in an iframe, that is, in a window embedded in the LMS page. The learner does not switch tabs, sees no login screen, and never wonders where they are. They run the practice, receive their debrief, and return to the course. The same embedded display principle we describe in our iframe tutorial on the Genially side, with identity and results added on top.
This is the question that comes up at every project meeting, and the answer is structural. The learner never authenticates with the external tool: the LMS vouches for them, on every click, through a verifiable signature.
In other words, trust does not run through the user, it runs between the platforms. Three practical consequences. A learner who loses access to the LMS loses access to the tool automatically — no orphan accounts. A learner whose name or group changes is updated with no intervention. And your support desk stops receiving password requests for a tool that issues none.
Without Deep Linking, somebody copies a URL and pastes it into the course. With Deep Linking, the trainer adds an activity, a selection window opens, they pick the scenario they want from the catalogue, and the activity is created with that scenario already attached. No address to handle, no routing mistakes. That is the subject of our dedicated article: choosing your scenario from the LMS with Deep Linking.
NRPS, or Names and Role Provisioning Services, lets the tool ask the LMS for the list of people enrolled on a course and their roles. The LMS group becomes the cohort on the Face Up side. Enrol a learner mid-year in your LMS and they appear in the tool without anyone asking you for a file.
AGS, or Assignment and Grade Services, travels the other way. The tool sends the LMS a score out of 100 and the completion status, and can feed several grade lines, so several columns of the gradebook. This is the sensitive point when the subject is people skills, and we devote a full article to it: sending results back with AGS.
H3 Campus takes in between 3,000 and 4,000 learners a year, work-study students spread across a broad range of fields: management, sales, HR and property. Their new Moodle was built by their integration partner eLearning Touch', and Face Up plugs into it for the 2026 intake.
At that scale, account provisioning is not an implementation detail: it decides whether the project survives the year or collapses in November. With LTI, the reference list stays the one in the LMS. One source, one place to correct a mistake.
A learner who has to open a second tool, find a link and log in is given three chances to give up. Embedded in the course, practice becomes one step among others, at the right moment.
The chambers of commerce and industry make very concrete use of this. CCI Hauts-de-France and CCI de Grenoble serve two audiences: professionals on short courses and students through their apprenticeship training centre. They use conversational practice before the session to prepare, during it to put things into practice, and after it to embed the reflexes. That sequencing only works if access is immediate at each of the three moments.
At Eurotunnel, around 1,000 learners practise customer relations scenarios from Rise Up — the French LMS, not to be confused with the authoring tool Articulate Rise 360, whose name invites confusion. What HR tracks is skills progression on their new approach to customer relations, and team engagement; gamification and inter-team challenges are used to encourage practice.
None of this is usable if results live in a separate tool. Brought back into the LMS, they join the dashboards HR already reads and combine with the rest of the path. That is also what makes large-scale deployment possible without multiplying reporting tools.
A protocol carries identity and results. It does not tell you which scenarios to choose, where to place them in a path, or what you expect from a learner at the end. The quality of a practice situation, its difficulty, the relevance of the debrief: all of that remains instructional design work. Technology removes friction, it does not invent intent.
A people skill is built through repetition and feedback. The score landing in the gradebook is a marker, not proof of mastery. What drives progress is what the learner understands about their own conversation, and what the trainer does with it afterwards in the room. We develop this point in assessing and measuring soft skills.
Three questions head off most blockages. Who in your organisation holds the admin rights on the LMS to register an external tool? Who decides which scenarios trainers can use? And what do you want to see in the gradebook: a completion flag, a score, or several separate lines? Those answers are matters of governance for your training stack, not of protocol. If the role of each building block is still unclear, our comparison of authoring tool, LMS and LCMS sets the frame.
LTI 1.3 is not a technical subject in disguise: it is an organisational decision. You choose that the LMS remains the single front door, that learner identity is managed in one place only, and that results come back to the course rather than into an export.
The mechanism is easy to remember: two platforms recognise each other through an identity, a client_id and public keys; the LMS vouches for the learner on every click; the tool opens in an iframe inside the course. The rest — choosing scenarios, syncing groups, sending grades back — rests on the three LTI Advantage services.
The logical next step is to see how a trainer picks a scenario without leaving the LMS, and then how the results of a practice session find their place in a gradebook without betraying what they measure.
