Brightspace User Provider - Administration Guide

Using this requires you to turn on an Opencast plugin. Take a look at the plugin management documentation to find out how you can do that.

What it does

The Brightspace User Provider enriches Opencast users with a set of roles made up of the user's membership in Brightspace courses, of the form ROLE_courseID. For example, an Opencast user who is also a Brightspace user and a member of the Brightspace course myCourseID will be granted the Opencast role ROLE_myCourseID.

Requirements

The Brightspace User Provider uses the Brightspace REST API (version 1.31 of the Learning Platform API) with the ID-Key authentication of D2L. The Brightspace URL therefore has to start with https://, and you need the following from your Brightspace administrator:

Application ID and key: These identify Opencast as an application towards Brightspace. They are issued when registering an application with D2L.
System user ID and key: The provider makes its requests in the name of a Brightspace user, the system user. The ID and key of that user are issued when the user authorizes the application to act on their behalf.
Sufficient permissions for the system user: The role of the system user needs at least the following permissions. Otherwise Brightspace rejects requests or leaves out data, and users will lack some of their roles in Opencast.
- See the user name of other users (in the user information privacy settings): Required for looking up a user by user name.
- View user enrollments and Search for {role name} for all roles your users have in courses: Required for getting the courses and roles of a given user. Brightspace only returns the enrollments which the system user could also see.

The provider only reads data and never changes anything in Brightspace.

Note: D2L has deprecated ID-Key authentication in favor of OAuth 2.0 and classifies older versions of the Learning Platform API, which includes version 1.31, as obsolete. D2L may remove access to them from Brightspace. Ask your Brightspace administrator whether your instance still supports both.

Step 1: Enable the User Provider

Edit etc/org.opencastproject.plugin.impl.PluginManagerImpl and make sure the opencast-plugin-userdirectory-brightspace plugin is enabled.

Step 2: Configure the User Provider

To enable the Brightspace User Provider, copy and rename the bundled configuration template from OPENCAST/etc/org.opencastproject.userdirectory.brightspace-default.cfg.template to OPENCAST/etc/org.opencastproject.userdirectory.brightspace-default.cfg

Edit the configuration file to set your Brightspace URL and the credentials needed for making authenticated API calls.

# The organization for this provider
org.opencastproject.userdirectory.brightspace.org=mh_default_org

# The URL for the Brightspace REST webservice
org.opencastproject.userdirectory.brightspace.url=https://brightspace-api

# properties for authentication in brightspace api
org.opencastproject.userdirectory.brightspace.systemuser.id=system-user-id
org.opencastproject.userdirectory.brightspace.systemuser.key=system-user-key
org.opencastproject.userdirectory.brightspace.application.id=application-id
org.opencastproject.userdirectory.brightspace.application.key=application-key


# The maximum number of users to cache
#org.opencastproject.userdirectory.brightspace.cache.size=1000

# The maximum number of minutes to cache a user
#org.opencastproject.userdirectory.brightspace.cache.expiration=60

Step 3: Verify Granted Access

Verify that the Brightspace User Provider starts up with the correct Brightspace URL by looking for a log entry like this:

(BrightspaceUserProviderInstance:143) - Creating new BrightspaceUserProviderInstance(pid=org.opencastproject.userdirectory.brightspace.378cdff4-825f-4b60-b1ed-33f75aa7f265, url= ... , cacheSize=1000, cacheExpiration=60)

Then login to Opencast using a username which also exists in your Brightspace system. Verify the roles granted to the user by opening the URL OPENCAST-URL/info/me.json in a new browser tab, or navigate to the user details and open the tab "Effective Roles".

If necessary, you can increase the logging detail from the Brightspace user provider by adding an entry to OPENCAST/etc/org.ops4j.pax.logging.cfg:

log4j.logger.org.opencastproject.userdirectory.brightspace=DEBUG