Administering standardized tests online is trickier than it sounds. Underneath the facade of simple multiple choice forms, any workable platform needs a complex web of features to ensure that databases don’t buckle under the pressure of tens of thousands of test takers at once. On top of that, it also needs to ensure that responses are scored correctly and that it’s impossible for students to cheat.
“If there’s 400,000 kids taking a 50 question science test, you can’t have a single click lost in that time period,” said Doug Wilson, co-founder and Managing Partner at Breakthrough Technologies. “You really have to be sweating all the details.”
In addition to technical aspects like security and data integrity, the student assessment space poses unique challenges from a user experience standpoint. Many tests are only administered once a year, so the interface needs to be immediately intuitive for students and teachers who are using it for the first time.
The need for a vendor to balance all these concerns can make testing software prohibitively expensive for cash-strapped education systems.
Wilson wants to break down those barriers using open source technology. This year, his company partnered with the Illinois State Board of Education to deliver science tests to 400,000 students in grades 5 and 8 using an open source framework originally developed at the University of Luxembourg.
“We compete in the testing market with organizations that have $7 billion in annual revenue. Breakthrough is not a big player in that space — we’re probably the smallest,” said Wilson. “If all we do is offer up a slightly cheaper or slightly better version of what everyone else is already offering, we’re going to get killed in the marketplace.”
Wilson said open source licensing gives Breakthrough a competitive edge by reducing both costs and risk for the customer. If the state wants to work with a new vendor or run the testing software on its own, they can freely access the platform’s codebase. It also allows other states to take advantage of the platform, regardless of whether or not they work with Breakthrough.
“Our vision is that this platform could have a life of its own,” said Wilson. “There’s really no barriers to that, and that idea of a free and open platform is really disruptive in the space. We’re excited to be a part of it and figure out how we can build a business around it.”
Breakthrough Technologies was founded by three software engineers from Abbott Labs in 1998, and has since grown to a headcount of 65. Although the company started off as a traditional software consultancy, Breakthrough started experimenting with open source technology in 2004 to build websites.
“We quickly got tired of hacking together HTML and things like that, and found that there were some interesting content management systems out there, and we settled on Drupal,” said Wilson.
Building on the success they had with Drupal for websites, Breakthrough started looking for open source tools that could be helpful in other aspects of their business. One of those solutions was TAO, the European framework upon which Breakthrough’s science assessment solution was built.
“Open source was not that popular, frankly, as a term, ten or twelve years ago, but now we have organizations and entire governments who are saying they want 100 percent of their federal IT projects in open source,” said Wilson.
The United States government hasn’t gone quite that far yet, but back in August, the Obama administration announced a federal source code policy that requires agencies to release 20 percent of the code they commission under an open source license. Agencies including NASA, the Department of Commerce and the Environmental Protection Agency have already published projects through Code.gov, an open source hub set up for that purpose.
As a longstanding open source enthusiast, Wilson is excited that the U.S. government is joining the movement.
“We see a groundswell around open source technologies,” said Wilson. “What we’re trying to do is figure out how Breakthrough, as a private company, can create business models that can deliver really high-value implementations based on open-source technologies, but also sell our services profitably.”
Images via Breakthrough Technologies.
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