Record numbers use NAPLAN online test platform

Microsoft has supported digital assessment education platform Janison to develop an online platform for NAPLAN testing.

In May 2021, 800,000 school students completed their NAPLAN tests online. Janison’s digital assessment platform had over three million tests completed in a two-week period, and at the peak, more than 195,000 students were being tested concurrently, with more than 32,000 transactions a second.

Starting in 2017, Janison has been progressively supporting NAPLAN testing moving online, and this year 70% of students sat the test online. For 2022 there are plans to lift that to 100% — and Janison is now optimising the platform so that it will seamlessly accommodate even larger increases in users.

Working with Microsoft engineers, architects and partners to continually improve the performance of the platform using .NET, Azure SQL DB and Service Fabric, Janison is now also looking to leverage Microsoft’s NoSQL solution Cosmos DB, to tune the platform’s performance even further.

According George Gorman, Janison’s Chief Technology Officer, when it comes to NAPLAN Online there are three inviolable rules for the underlying digital platform which has to deliver a seamless experience for students in high-stakes, high-volume assessments.

“The first is performance. The second is security. And the third is equity of the test for the student, no matter their location or ability,” he said.

For students that means they are able to sit the test using any equipment, wherever they are based, and have the same sort of experience as any other student, without any interruptions or glitches.

Besides the Insights platform that Janison supplies to Education Services Australia (ESA) for NAPLAN Online, Janison offers its own K–12 assessment and benchmarking products — Reach and the ICAS competition — under its ICAS Assessments business unit, as well as the PISA for Schools tests, for which it is the national service provider for the OECD in several countries. The PISA for Schools test, which Janison delivers using Insights, is used extensively by OECD countries to gain deep learning insights about its students, allowing them to benchmark and build better education frameworks.

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