Spike: can we link to courses & assignments in each of the major LMS's

[marcospri]

This question will have to be answered separately for each LMS that we care about, for example: Canvas, Blackboard Classic, Blackboard Ultra, D2L, ...

Do assignments actually have their own URLs? And can Hypothesis actually get or generate the URLs for assignments?

It has been clarified in Slack that we do still think that the email notifications feature is worth implementing even if we can't link to assignments at all. Linking to assignments is just a nice-to-have.

Slack threads:

• Can we get assignment URLs from LTI variables?
• Linking to Blackboard assignments. Contact with Blackboard support about linking to Blackboard assignments
• Linking to Canvas assignments
• Linking to D2L Brightspace assignments

An alternative to linking directly to assignments within LMS's might be to implement launching Hypothesis assignments outside of LMS's.

Fallback solutions

If we can't link directly to the assignment then if possible we should do one of these:

• Link to the assignments section within the course (e.g. link to the "folder" containing the assignment in Blackboard)
• Link to the assignment's course
• Link to some sort of useful page within the LMS instance where the user can see their assignments or course, e.g. some sort of user profile page
• Link to the front page of the LMS instance