by Geoffrey Murase, Solutions Marketing, End-User Computing
In college, a professor in one of my classes once drew an interesting graph that really illustrated my study habits. The graph is similar to the one shown below:
As we all know, this type of graph rings true in many situations (e.g., mobilizing the U.S. Congress to raise the debt ceiling). School districts around the country are encountering a similar situation as the target timeframe for rolling out the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) is the 2014-2015 school year. The primary way of delivering the state assessments that will measure student progress toward meeting the CCSSI standards is online testing. VMware® recently partnered with the Center for Digital Education to conduct a survey among educators to gauge how prepared schools are to meet this timeline. We found that while online testing is top of mind among 81% of survey respondents, only 18% are ready for online testing today. Time to start cramming!
Fortunately, VMware has a solution that can help. There are two major platforms for delivering online tests to meet the Common Core State Standards Initiative requirements. The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) are multistate consortia awarded funding from the U.S. Department of Education in 2010 to develop an assessment system aligned to the Common Core State Standards by the 2014-15 school year.
VMware has proven deployments at customers using both platforms to give peace of mind to those school districts in need of an easy to manage, easy to deploy solution for online testing using the SBAC or PARCC platforms.
This past spring, the Somerset School District in Wisconsin was selected to be part of a pilot program to test the SBAC platform. We recently documented their experience in a customer case study video. As Ryan Sicard, Director of IT at the Somerset School District notes, ““Somerset School District has had a great experience with VMware Horizon View™ and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium testing. I would highly recommend it as a platform for anyone facing the same challenges we are.”
Similarly, we created a video documenting the experience of the Aledo School District in Texas using the Pearson TestNav test delivery system which is the platform that PARCC uses. Brooks Moore, Manager of Technology Services, TexServe at Aledo ISD notes, “We have a testing image that we can deploy in a matter of minutes—it’s just a few clicks. We can even deploy a test to an iPad. And as soon as the test is over, we can flip the image back to a normal classroom environment almost instantly. Online testing is something that keeps a lot of IT managers up at night, but for us it’s just another Monday morning.”
So if you’re cramming to meet the target 2014-2015 timeframe as part of the 82% who haven’t deployed an online testing solution yet, VMware offers an easy to deploy, secure, flexible solution that delivers a seamless end user experience.
Click to find out more information about VMware’s online testing solution. Are you about to start cramming? Tell us about it on Twitter and Facebook!
