2025-12
🎉 TAO December 2025 Release Highlights! 🎉
Introducing TAO Community Edition
We are excited to announce the launch of TAO Community Edition (CE); a new, open, and modular evolution of the TAO platform, which is designed to support extensible, community-driven digital assessment. TAO CE introduces a modern toolset for authoring, delivery, scoring, analytics, and administration, and will progressively replace TAO Core, which is being deprecated. For more information, see the TAO Community Edition website.
Consolidated session start time
The session administrator can now enforce the exact start date / time for all test takers in a session. When this feature is enabled, a waiting page will display for everyone joining the session before the designated date / time.
Global notifications center
The ability to view and access previously closed notifications is now available in the TAO Portal. This enhancement allows users to revisit important messages anytime via a permanent notification center.
Added flexibility for automatic test review
The automatic test review shown immediately after session submission can now be configured independently from the option that allows test takers to review finished sessions and their responses.
Release enhancements
TAO Authoring Updates & Fixes
Bug Fix: Imported passages now keep their original file name.
TAO Advance Updates & Fixes
Bug Fix: Improved compact media player rendering in various situations, such as during item / test preview or for item’s with right-to-left orientation.
TAO Portal Updates & Fixes
New field in the bulk data import session CSV file: The session configuration field “automatically start the review right after the session is finished” is now added to the Portal’s downloadable session CSV files.
Normalized scores added to session reports: Session reports for both the session administrators and the test-takers now include a normalized percentage of the achieved score out of the maximum score.
Extended Text automatic spellchecking configuration: Session administrators can now enable or disable the automatic browser-based spellchecking for test taker input within the Extended Text interaction. To configure additional spellcheckers, please speak to your Account Manager.
Configurable response shuffling for test review: Sessions can now be configured so that during test reviews by session administrators, responses display in their original order (regardless of whether item shuffling is enabled).
Remote proctoring configuration: If remote proctoring is enabled for a TAO environment, it can now be enabled/disabled at a session level. To configure remote proctoring for your environment, please speak to your Account Manager.
Bug Fix: Fixed an issue where recently finished sessions sometimes appeared as active in the test taker’s "My sessions" tab. All completed sessions are now correctly shown in the test taker’s “Finished Sessions” tab.
These updates aim to enhance usability, efficiency, and the overall TAO platform experience. We welcome your feedback and remain committed to continuous improvement. Thank you for your support! 🚀