How Swiss Cantons Built a Unified Assessment Platform for Children Aged 4 to 13

The Institut fur Bildungsevaluation (IBE) and Cito selected Trifork to build Mindsteps, an e-learning portal serving four Swiss cantons. The platform supports both everyday classroom practice and high-stakes cantonal assessments in a single interoperable system built on open standards.

The Bildungsraum Nordwestschweiz, a collaboration between the Swiss cantons of Aargau, Basel-Landschaft, Basel-Stadt and Solothurn, set out to build a unified educational system for children aged 4 to 13. Central to that ambition was a single platform for both classroom practice and high-stakes cantonal assessments, across four education systems, in one interoperable environment.

The Institut für Bildungsevaluation (IBE) and the University of Zurich selected Trifork as technology partner, with Assessible at the heart of the solution.

One Platform, Two Very Different Needs

The project required a platform that could serve low-stakes formative learning on classroom devices, while also delivering the security required for high-stakes cantonal exams. Both had to work within a single system built on open standards.

The result was Mindsteps, an e-learning portal giving students and teachers access to a full item database throughout the school year. Teachers can build tailor-made tests and learning units for individual students or groups. When high-stakes assessments are required, the same platform delivers secure lockdown browser sessions with full exam conditions.

All content is QTI compliant and interoperable with external authoring systems, including Trifork’s Assessible. The platform runs on any device via HTML5, critical for classroom use across four cantons with different infrastructure.

“Trifork has proven to be a worthy partner for us on both the technological and the digital assessment domain. In a short time span, they were capable of delivering a very advanced digital assessment system which enables us to meet our current and future needs.” Urs Moser, Head of IBE

Mindsteps shaped Assessible into what it is today, and it is a story we are proud to share with the eAA community.

Learn more about the customer case at: trifork.nl/?cases=advanced-e-learning-portal-for-students-and-teachers