Does Brightspace Support LTI® 1.3?
The short answer
Yes. D2L Brightspace supports LTI® 1.3 and the LTI® Advantage services, with both dynamic registration and manual registration available.
D2L documents the pieces separately in its community knowledge base — the deep linking extension and the names and roles extension — alongside the specification from 1EdTech Consortium, Inc.
How registration works
- Dynamic registration. An administrator registers a new tool and provides the registration URL; the systems exchange their settings automatically.
- Manual registration. The administrator creates the tool by hand, then the Brightspace installation is registered on your side with the values it produces.
Brightspace separates registering a tool from deploying it to org units. As with Blackboard, a registration that exists but has not been deployed produces a tool nobody can launch.
The Brightspace-specific thing that catches people
Redirect URLs are matched exactly. Brightspace requires the URL being launched to appear in the registered redirect URL list as a literal string match.
The usual failure is a trailing slash: https://your.ltiaas.com/ registered as
a redirect URL while https://your.ltiaas.com is the target link URI, or the
reverse. The error surfaces as an authentication failure with a message about
the redirect URI not matching a registered value, which describes the symptom
accurately but not the cause.
If a Brightspace launch fails at the authentication step, compare those two values character by character before looking anywhere else.
Testing
D2L operates a developer sandbox with LTI® 1.3 support, which is a practical way to test against Brightspace without an institutional agreement. See how to test an LTI® 1.3 integration for what to exercise once you have one.
D2L also documents third-party cookie issues for LTI tools, which is worth reading with our own account of that problem — theirs is admin-facing, ours is developer-facing.
Setting it up
The Brightspace setup guide has the current step-by-step process, including screenshots of where each value goes.
Common questions
Does Brightspace support dynamic registration?
Yes. Brightspace supports both dynamic and manual registration, and dynamic is the less error-prone of the two.
Why does my Brightspace launch fail authentication?
Most often the redirect URL. Brightspace matches it as an exact string, so a trailing slash present in one place and absent in the other is enough to fail.
Is D2L the same as Brightspace?
D2L is the company and Brightspace is the product. Both names appear in documentation and refer to the same platform.
