Endless options with Integrations: LDAP, AD, SAML, OAuth, Social, LTI, API, scripts and more
Having a larger company or managing an educational institution on a scale is challenging, especially when using 3rd party tools and applications. You do not want your users to register on every platform the organization decides to use. Also, if employees or students are leaving, you have to take care of disabling and/or removing accounts to save costs and make operations secure. That is where integrations come into play!
Integrations, in general
When we say integrations, generally, we speak about a big category. It can have lots of forms of how different systems or databases interoperate. It can be a low-level database synchronization, it can be a standardized protocol spoken by both sides or it can easily be just API calls going back and forth. Let's see which and how they are supported by our EduBase platform!
LDAP, Active Directory
These integrations help users use their external login credentials directly on the platform. Users enter for example their corporate identity and password on the EduBase login page, and during the login flow, our platform reaches out to the LDAP or AD server and validates it. You can even verify their group memberships (or other factors), making it possible to restrict which of your users are allowed to sign in!
Do not worry, though! EduBase does not store these credentials, and they are always validated against these credential servers. Hence, if your employees or students leave the organization and you have their accounts disabled, they will not be able to access our application as well.
SAML, OAuth, Social
These might also be categorized under SSO, which stands for Single Sign-On. While LDAP and AD login is pretty much invisible to the user, SAML, OAuth, and Social logins are further from that. You, as a user, are redirected to a login page and, once successfully authenticated, redirected back to our application with some additional data (payload) in the background. This allows EduBase to identify the user and provision a local account for them. While this might suggest organizational accounts only, we support Facebook, Google, and Microsoft (and any other OAuth-capable services) logins on our homepage. If you have a separate EduBase instance (running on your own subdomain), we can still enable it for you!
LTI
Learning Tools Interoperability, or LTI in short, is a less-known integration type, yet it has its whole "marketplace" for LTI-compatible apps. LTI helps tool providers like us operating a quizzing service to better integrate into LMS systems. It not just helps with user authentication but a whole lot of other features. An LMS user can select an EduBase exam and assign it to users on that platform. They can open it and complete the test without ever leaving the LMS. Once the exam is finished, EduBase silently pushes the results back into the learning platform.
If you are interested in using EduBase as an LTI tool, we recommend checking out our EduAppCenter page for further information.
API
We have another post about API and our capabilities, but in short, it allows 3rd party systems to manage EduBase users, contents, resources, and permissions in the background. It can be used to create and delete users, assign them to exams, or just give them special permissions to given resources. Possibilities are endless, especially since we can extend it if existing API endpoints cannot cover a specific use case. We have a Developer documentation that can get you started!
Scripts and custom integrations
When all above fails to satisfy our customers' needs, we can still develop custom integrations or small scripts embedded into EduBase. This might even include calling other APIs through secure connections (for example, VPN) and synchronizing users from there. You can always reach out to us to discuss specific problems and use cases!