Edfinity

We now have Edfinity!

Edfinity provides affordable access to exceptional educational instruction and content from the world's best educators, and award winning educational research for the school and collegiate levels. We are headquartered in Palo Alto, with a distributed presence across the United States, Europe, Australia and India, and serve partners and users in over 25 countries. Edfinity is a recipient of multiple National Science Foundation awards, including several NSF Business Innovation Research awards, and is trusted by the world's premier academic associations and educators. Edfinity also partners with many OER textbooks providing a rich content resource for students! I have been excited about this product and it's now integrated with Canvas!

Connecting Canvas and Edfinity Using LTI 

Using LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability), you can integrate Canvas with Edfinity. Students log into Canvas and access specific Edfinity assignments, and their grades are passed back to Canvas as they complete their assignments. This configuration needs to be done prior to any student enrollment in the relevant Edfinity section(s). 

Please read the following sections carefully. 

Setting up LTI authentication 

Before you can make configure your course for LTI, Canvas needs to have some configuration done to connect with Edfinity. If you don't know if this has been performed already, contact your institutions's LMS administrator. The administrator can contact us at hello@edfinity.com.  

Detailed instructions for setting up LTI authentication with Canvas can be found here. 

Indicating your course will be accessed from an LMS 

It's important to indicate that students will access your course using LTI. This ensures students can only access assignments through the LMS and that grades will be synchronized correctly.  

To specify students will access the course via LMS, choose the "Via an LMS" access option when you create your course, or choose the option in LTI section of your course's Settings tab. 

 

Passing grades back to Canvas 

There are two ways to pass back grades. You can have each assignment appear in the LMS individually, each with its own grade. You also can have your entire Edfinity course appear as a single LMS assignment with a single averaged grade. 

Passing back individual assignment grades 

Go to your assignment and select the Settings tab. Open the Learning Tools Integration (LTI) section. 

 
 

Click the Clipboard icon to copy the Tool URL. 

Open your Canvas course and add a new assignment. Choose a Submission Type of External Tool. Paste your copied URL into the External Tool URL Field. 
 
Important: you don't need to press the "Find" button after filling in the URL and can safely ignore any error message you see if you do so. 

 
 

Be sure to click "Load This Tool In A New Tab" 

Publish your Canvas assignment if you haven't done so. 

Passing back a single course grade 

Go to your course and select the Settings tab. Open the Learning Tools Integration (LTI) section. 

 
 

Click the Clipboard icon to copy the Tool URL. 

Open your Canvas course and add a new assignment. Choose a Submission Type of External Tool. Paste your copied URL into the External Tool URL Field. 
 
Important: you don't need to press the "Find" button after filling in the URL and can safely ignore any error message you see if you do so. 

 
 

Be sure to click "Load This Tool In A New Tab" 

Publish your Canvas assignment if you haven't done so. 

Coordinating due dates 

Edfinity and your LMS both have a means of setting availability dates and due dates. Issues can arise when the two systems get out of sync. 

Grades are posted from Edfinity to your LMS when an assignment is finished. This happens either after the due date passes, or when a student finishes an assignment with the "Release when completed" release method configured. 

Unless you have all of your assignments set to "Release when completed," you will need to coordinate due dates. We recommend using Edfinity to manage the dates and allow unrestricted access to assignments from within your LMS. If this isn't possible, you will need to ensure due dates are manually synchronized in both systems in order to prevent issues with availability.  

How to create an assignment 

To create an assignment, go to your course. Click Create Assignment in the left menu. 

 

Enter the assignment's name and select Create. 

 

Copying an assignment 

To copy an assignment, go to the assignment. Select the Copy button. 

 

Enter the new assignment name, select the course where you want the assignment to be copied, and select Copy. 

 

Additional helpful links: 

Instructor video to students: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSbxtr23mTc 

 

Additional help/information on creating/managing assignments: https://edfinity.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/sections/360001421671-Working-with-Assignments