TAO (e-Testing platform)
| Developer(s) |
Open Assessment Technologies S.A., LIST (formerly CRP Henri Tudor), EMACS research unit of the University of Luxembourg |
|---|---|
| Stable release |
3.0 / May 2015
|
| Written in | PHP |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Type | Course management system |
| License | GPLv2 |
| Website | taotesting.com |
TAO is the French acronym for Testing Assisté par Ordinateur (Computer Based Testing).
The TAO framework provides an open architecture for computer-assisted test development and delivery, with the potential to respond to the whole range of evaluation needs. It provides to all the actors of the entire computer-based assessment process a comprehensive set of functionalities enabling the creation, the management, and the delivery of electronic assessments. The TAO platform is developed by the EMACS research unit of the University of Luxembourg and the SSI department of the Centre de Recherche Public Henri Tudor.
The TAO framework is an open-source project which provides a very general and open architecture for computer-assisted test development and delivery. As upcoming evaluation needs will imply the collaboration among a large number of stakeholders situated at different institutional levels and with very different needs for assessment tools, the TAO framework has the ambition to provide a modular and versatile framework for collaborative distributed test development and delivery with the potential to be extended and adapted to virtually every evaluation purpose that could be handled by the means of computer-based assessment.
In order to reach this goal, the testing problem has been broken down into its constitutive parts:
These parts are implemented under the form of multiple specialized modules connected in a peer-to-peer network. As the TAO architecture should fit into many different use cases, there is no central node in the system (the whole network of TAO nodes is an open-system with no global consistency) and it is assumed that there cannot be an a priori model for each data domain that reaches consensus within all the actors. On the contrary, each module owner or user is free to build the model that best corresponds to his own view. In order to support this model diversity, TAO modules are equipped with advanced modelling functionalities allowing users to build dynamically their own model and share data organized according to different models.
The description of the platform architecture at the current stage is organized on a component basis. A part of these components are independent from the computer-assisted testing domain.
The TAO platform should be considered as a particular instantiation (for a particular purpose) of a more general platform dedicated to the collaborative and distributed management of web resources and of the ontologies describing these resources. The more specific components will be presented afterward. The TAO platform consists in a series of interconnected modules. Each module is a specialization of a more generic kernel application called Generis4.
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