Success in the USA for LIST’s spin-off OAT and its Open Source assessment platform TAO®

The Luxembourg Institute of Science & Technology (LIST) is pleased to announce that TAO, the Open Source assessment platform for Education and Public Sector Employment developed by its spin-off company Open Assessment Technologies S.A., will be used by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) for a large-scale assessment programme in the USA.

PARCC is a consortium of states working collaboratively to develop a set of assessments to measure if students are on track to succeed in school and in their future careers. The organisation will use TAO’s assessment platform to develop a non-summative assessment delivery system for students from kindergarten to 12th grade based on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). This will be used to measure the learning progress in key CCSS subject areas of more than 12 million students across 12 states and the District of Columbia.

PARCC chose TAO due to its Open Source nature, which will make it possible to integrate developments more easily with other partners and allow for significant savings in maintenance costs. OAT and Breakthrough Technologies – the TAO Authorised Partner for the USA and Canada – will provide PARCC with the essential infrastructure and tools for computer-based assessment delivery, providing all the critical components including a teacher portal, student registration, test delivery and scoring, results analysis, and reporting.

“We are pleased that the PARCC consortium selected TAO for the technical infrastructure necessary to deliver a secure, reliable, flexible, and scalable computer-based assessment solution,” said Marc Oswald, co-founder and CEO of Open Assessment Technologies S.A. “Our Open Source solution gives education officials full control over their assessment assets, and the agility to respond to changing requirements at a fraction of today’s cost.”

Development of TAO first began in 2002 through a research project carried out by the former Public Research Centre Henri Tudor, which merged with the Public Research Centre Gabriel Lippmann on January 1st, 2015  to form LIST, and the University of Luxembourg. The prototype was further improved through subsequent projects and collaboration with a number of partners in the education sector, and was first used by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2006 for its PISA evaluations. OAT was created as a spin-off in 2013, and continues to further develop the innovative assessment tool with success, as shown by this new contract with PARCC.

Since the launch of OAT, LIST has continued to be active in the field of technology-based assessment through research carried out by the IT for Innovative Services (ITIS) department.

>>Read more about the history of TAO and on the spinoff OAT at www.taotesting.com