According to the Auditor General of Pennsylvania, “between 2015 and 2021, Pennsylvania will have spent nearly $100 million,” on standardized tests. And EdWeek reported that standardized testing costs states well over a billion dollars every year. While some states today are delivering a majority of tests online, the cost of testing is still much higher in the U.S. than in countries around the world.
Standardizing on open-source assessment systems not only saves states significant taxpayer dollars, it also saves time at the state, district, and school levels as administrators, teachers, and students do not have to manage multiple platforms and learn a new assessment system every time a vendor changes.
We're sharing recommendations that show states and districts how easy it is to switch to open-source assessment. Download our recent white paper to discover the benefits of:
TAO is the leading open source online assessment platform for K12, Higher Education and Professional Certification, having delivered over 100 million tests in more than 30 languages worldwide. Our platform empowers you to break free from the confines of proprietary data silos, take control of your testing resources and reach wider, more diverse student populations.
We know that online assessment applications need to be accessible. But, there could be a wide interpretation of what is successfully accessible. The WorldWide Web Consortium was concerned with this very problem, and through international cooperation of its members, developed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
The W3C released WCAG version 2.1 in 2019, which added new success criteria to further increase accessibility in education for users across the world. While many systems are retrofitted with new features to support this criteria, TAO is built on these standards from the ground up to guarantee accessibility for test-takers and authors alike. Learn More.
TAO's open source platform gives you the freedom to control your digital assessment programs, from item authoring to delivery, at any scale. And because the platform is QTI-native, you'll never risk losing your testing assets to a locked system.
TAO is built on QTI to ensure your platform, tests and items are 100% interoperable. Because of the platform’s open architecture, TAO is ready-made to integrate with your existing solutions. You can even easily integrate with platforms like Moodle to deliver assessments right in your LMS.
Confidently scale your testing campaigns from the classroom to nation-wide. TAO Pro and TAO Enterprise Editions can scale test deliveries to well over 200,000 concurrent users, and testing data is securely stored on the server-side, reducing any risk of compromising or losing critical information.
TAO comes with built-in functionality to support for Computer Adaptive Testing (CAT). This enables you to have control over which adaptive testing algorithms you want to use depending on the purpose of your test, and allows you to offer a more personalized assessment experience to your test-takers.
TAO gives you the flexibility to host your platform yourself, use a third party provider or if you're a Premium or Enterprise user, leverage a shared or private TAO Cloud. You can also deliver tests via LTI directly within your LMS, test-centers and more.