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November 2024 Release

Take a look at what’s new in this month’s TAO platform release! These updates are designed to streamline our processes and enhance the usability and effectiveness of the TAO platform. We value your feedback and are committed to continually improving your testing experience. Thank you for your ongoing support.

TAO Authoring updates & fixes:

  • Print test-taker tool: Print Out is a new test-taker tool which allows the test-taker to print the contents of an item (the printed content will remove any UI distractions, such as buttons or icons). Note: This feature is currently limited to items with text blocks, images, and/or passages.

  • Fixed: In some cases, formatting for item and test preview was not consistent (particularly around the use of headings within a text). This has been resolved.

TAO Advance updates & fixes:

  • Image drag&drop behavior improvements: Dragging and dropping an image over a plain text input field will no longer also copy and paste the image’s URL.

  • Lithuanian language support for text-to-speech: Lithuanian language support has been added to the built-in text-to-speech engine used in TAO Advance.

  • New special characters: Additional characters with diacritics were added to the special characters tool for the Extended Text interaction.

  • Fixed: Previously, keyboard shortcuts were not usable for order interactions when using the new order single list mode. This has been resolved.

  • Fixed: Test-takers could not submit a response when using the Extended Text Interaction if going beyond the text constraints (even if the Validate Responses option was not enabled). This has been resolved.

  • Fixed: When inserting an image or a table in an Extended Text Interaction (which had Max Words constraints and Validate Responses enabled), the session navigation failed in some instances. This has been resolved.

TAO Portal updates & fixes:

  • Case insensitive usernames:  We’ve simplified the authentication and user creation constraints in TAO Portal – usernames are now treated as case insensitive.

  • Improved delivery preview: In order to ensure any timers are completely reset each time a delivery preview is performed, delivery previews during session creation/editing are now done anonymously.

  • New reports in Beta: Users can now enable/disable the custom reports beta feature, to be displayed under a new Reports tab. The Reports view allows the test administrator to access a group performance report, as well as a student performance report, while a global admin can now check the actual usage of their account.

  • Fixed: Downloading a PDF file for session and individual reports was not working consistently. This has been resolved.

  • Fixed: In some instances, the scores provided through manual scoring for a session that was reopened, rescored, and resubmitted by a proctor were wrongly calculated. This has been resolved.