Moving NAPLAN online

Minister Pyne's weekend announcement of funding to move the NAPLAN testing program online is welcome. However it raises a number of questions - many more than it provides answers. The biggest of these is the readiness of schools, around 10,000 of them around the country, to be able to deliver the online tests in such a way as to be reliable, fair and equitable, while delivering the benefits that online delivery offers over the present paper tests.

The benefits are clear - the ability to deliver results to students and more importantly, their teachers, much sooner than is the case at the moment. The sooner teachers have access to those results, the sooner they can do something with them.The other key benefit of online assessment is the ability to tailor the test to suit the ability of each student. A computer-based test can assess the student's performance throughout the test and rather than deliver the same test to every single student, it can adapt to the ability of the student. Students that are struggling to answer questions won't be fed a whole lot more questions that they can't answer but rather, would be diverted to more diagnostic questions that are designed to provide useful information to their teacher as to which learning areas need focus. Conversely, gifted students are branched to more difficult questions which will challenge them and extend them.

So much for the benefits; the challenge of course is to deliver it, and these challenges fall upon our shoulders technology experts. The Minister has announced funding for a delivery system but in reality, that is just the "head-end" piece - the engine. Delivering that to enough devices for over a million kids, studying in 10,000 schools - government, independent and Catholic - in eight states and territories, is going to be no mean feat.

And herein lies the biggest challenge - what are those devices, and how does the data get from the servers, the head-end, the engine, to each of those devices? OK, it's not a million devices - we are a long way from a 1:1 device ratio. But it's still a lot. A big lot. And devices are increasingly not owned by the school but by the student (or their parents). Maintaining a fleet of current technology for students is a cost that most schools simply cannot afford and the broader trend to BYOD has provided an opportunity for schools to relieve themselves of at least the hardware costs of devices.

Those devices - laptops and desktops in the main; phones are too small to do any meaningful assessment - need to offer students a consistent enough experience that the results from the test are comparable. Those devices could be anything from a 7" iPad Mini right up to a 24" screen on a desktop PC owned by the school. Not to mention the difference in typing speed between a full laptop or desktop keyboard and the on-screen substitute on a tablet. And the assessment experience has to be consistent across all of those.

I think I'll leave the network challenges for another time. That poses a completely different set of challenges - the inequity of access speeds, the huge differences in latency between landline and satellite connections, not to mention the reliability of connection. How do you test a school where the whole town is offline because a flood took out the bridge over which also carried the only fibre into town?

While it's great to see some leadership on this, it remains to be seen whether schools can be ready in time.