TAO Core 3.6 | Released January 2023

With our mission to provide global access to digital assessment tools that improve teaching and learning, the open-source community is at the heart of TAO. We’ve been working hard on new improvements to our open source Core platform in order to empower our community of users with innovative, secure, and reliable digital assessment tools that allow them to offer the testing experience educators and students deserve.

You can find supporting documentation for using TAO within this Guide as well as the TAO Training Portal.

What’s included in the TAO Core 3.6 Release?

Admin

Full compatibility with PHP 8.1 has been implemented for all TAO modules.
The display of languages throughout TAO has been improved by providing more details about the language variants and sorting the list alphabetically.
Users are now able to download any IMS-compatible PCI from TAO.

Authoring

Content developers can now select an RTL (right-to-left) language when authoring assessments. Content will automatically render on the orientation defined for each language. Currently, the languages added with RTL support include: Persian, Dari (Afghanistan), Hebrew, Kurdish (Iran), Pashto (Afghanistan), Persian (Iran), and Urdu (India).
The Passages Editor has been enhanced with richer formatting options, which include: enabling text-wrapping around images, rich styling for passages directly from the user interface, and the ability to apply both item and passage styling within a test.
Authors must input a section title in order to save a test to avoid errors down the line when trying to author, preview, export, or publish that test.
Test authors now have the capability of using an expression with gaps when using the Math Entry Interaction.
Authors have the ability to select individual cells, rows, and columns in a table within an item in order to apply formatting to multiple cells at once. Authors now also have the ability to individually align the content in any selected cell.
Support for Test Section Shuffling has been added, which allows a test author to define whole sections whose order can be shuffled during a delivery execution.
The capability to wrap text around images within both items and passages has been added.
The Hotspot Interaction has been adjusted to prevent the score for the hotspots from disappearing during authoring.
The ability to resize media within an item after it is added has been fixed.
Test authors now have the ability to select individual cells, rows, and columns in a table within an item in order to apply formatting to multiple cells at once. The ability to individually align the content in any selected cell has also been added.
Folders in Authoring can now be copied and duplicated.
The ability to apply image captions to any image while authoring items and passages has been added.
The ability to add horizontal rulers while authoring items and passages has been added.
Metadata management has been improved by allowing metadata to be imported together with an item or a test, as long as the property exists in the current location’s metadata schema.
Users can now set the maximum recording time for the Audio PCI as low as 5 seconds.
Users can now successfully render items with graphical PCIs such as the Graphing f(x), Number Line, or Line & Point PCIs.

Delivery

Improvements have been made for test-takers when listening to audio and the internet connection is lost. If there is an internet connection issue when the test-taker is listening to the audio, a message will be displayed and an option to reload the content will be available.
A performance issue has been solved to improve the expected loading time of items during the test preview.
The behavior of the Test Preview has been improved by no longer requiring users to respond to each Item whenever “allow skipping” is enabled in Item Session Control within a test.
Better support for Right-to-Left languages has been added by properly aligning the TAO logo based on the language orientation.
A new REST API endpoint that enables users to retrieve delivery execution information was added.

Results/Scoring

TAO now enables external platforms such as an LMS to use Assignment and Grade Services (AGS) when exchanging assessment results and grading information with TAO. Clients will be able to receive a subset of the results after the test delivery execution. AGS has been defined under the LTI 1.3 Advantage Services by IMS.
The way the MAXSCORE item outcome is computed whenever a Graphic Gap Match Interaction is used has been refined in such a way that an infinite amount of combinations can be achieved.
The way MAXSCORE is computed has been improved for all PCIs to take into account the number of PCIs in an item.
Users now have the ability to download and playback audio files from a test-taker’s recorded response directly from the results page.

List Management

A (configurable) limit of 1000 has been applied as the maximum number of elements in a list in order to avoid performance bottlenecks when managing the lists.
In order to increase usability and reduce the performance impact when managing lists, pagination (with 20 elements per page) for all lists has been added.
In order to increase usability and decrease the possibility of creating huge lists by mistake, from now on new lists are created with a single element, while new elements can be added one by one.
Information regarding deleted resources is now added to the Event Logs including the Uniform Resource Identifier URI of the deleted resource and the class name where it was deleted from.
A general permission problem that lead to some users gaining access to list management even without having the required rights has been fixed.

Minor Fixes

An issue preventing the author from saving an item when adding a table within an A-block that has scrolling enabled has been fixed.
An issue occurring with Graphic Select Point Interaction and high-resolution images that prevented the author from defining the score for defined areas has been fixed.
An issue that led to the “list type” for a newly added property being lost when saving the schema for a class has been fixed.
An issue that caused some user roles to be duplicated when the user tried to save changes made to them has been fixed.
The “shuffle/pin” button is now being displayed during authoring for Match Interactions, whenever the “Shuffle Choices” option is enabled.
The readability of text in table headers has been improved by sizing those columns appropriately to avoid splitting the words within.
Any video with the Media Player is now properly centered on the screen whenever its size is smaller than the page width.
The Inline Choice Interaction has been adjusted to fix an issue that was causing the interaction to be rendered with a right-to-left alignment even if a left-to-right language was defined on the current item.
The Choice Interaction rendering has been adjusted when the choices within the interaction include media and text and the orientation is changed from vertical to horizontal.
An issue that prevented the creation of tests in classes with an underscore at the beginning of their label has been fixed.
An issue with the categories inheritance mechanism during test assembly that led to wrong categories being inherited by items in some situations has been fixed.
An issue with File Upload interactions which led to the size of audio or video media not using the full width available has been fixed.
An issue that caused extended text interactions to fail to be rendered when using the [maxWo...

What's Changed

Update and release November LTS as TAO 3.5 by @mike-ionut-mihai-sandu-tao in #88
Update PHP version from 7.2 to 7.4 in the Docker image

Full Changelog: v3.4-rc01...3.5.0

What's new in TAO 3.5?

Authoring

Item Authoring: Item layout override allows you to set up Independent dual scrollable columns
Asset Management
- Provide the ability to edit a passage (shared stimulus) from the authoring interface
- Access Control Layer is now available also in Assets, to allow defining who has access to which assets
- Users now can upload svgz files
Test Authoring: We've applied the WYSIWYG concept also on the Test Authors, now the users can preview the test
Language management: Users now have the ability to apply right-to-left direction to items, based on the used language
Resource management improvements:
- An entire class (with all its resources) can now be moved to a different location within Items, Tests, Assets, and Test-takers
- New atomic roles are available for item management (E.g., Item Class Schema Manager, Item Viewer, Item Manager, Item Previewer, Item Properties Editor), which can be used as building blocks for other complex user roles
- We've enhanced the CSV export to allow users to add trace Variables when exporting the results into CSV files
We've made authoring improvements when configuring max and min constraints for HotText choices, and max and recommended length for Extended Text interactions

Test Runner

Right-to-left language capability has been enabled on the following components
- Validation messages
- Navigation bar elements
- Modal Dialogs
- Choice Interactions
- Hottext interactions
- Gap Match interactions
- Associate interactions
- Order interactions
Improve the performance of the test rendering
Possibility to enable test plugins on the LTI call (e.g. enable full screen)
Accessibility Improvements:
- Gap match keyboard behavior has been aligned to be consistent with Graphic gap match