Web Content Management System

National Assessment of Educational Progress

Background

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a program unit within the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), U.S. Department of Education. NAEP provides the only long-term, ongoing nationwide assessment of what K-12 students know and can do in several academic subject areas.

As in many government agencies, the program activities are delegated to several contractors. Various "Alliance Partners" are responsible for developing test items, designing samples, administering testing across the nation, and analyzing data. In addition, all these parties contribute content to the NAEP website.

With national attention to educational accountability at an all-time high, there is a need to publish information to the website as quickly as possible while meeting the highest possible standards of quality and accountability. Therefore, NAEP required a content management solution that was robust, flexible, and highly customized to its needs.

Solution

Fulcrum IT delivered a Web Content Management System that allows designated NAEP contractors to contribute to and manage designated channels of web content, working within the particular approval and deployment procedures NCES requires. The system is based on Microsoft Content Management Server, but is heavily customized for NAEP.

Results

Whereas before, technical managers had to handle and manually load all web content, now designated personnel among the contractor agencies have author and editor rights to particular areas of the site. Templates, resources galleries, style sheets, and familiar editing tools make the author's job reasonably easy. Fulcrum IT introduced the concept of snippets, a gallery of commonly used NAEP-specific code that can be easily copied into web pages.

Fulcrum IT significantly expanded the out-of-the-box permissions matrix, so the management of role permissions and access rules is highly granular. The approval and workflow process is also highly customized.

Fulcrum IT introduced the capability of managing packages of web content. This reflects the fact that web pages are interrelated and it helps site administrators to test and launch many pages at once to maintain site integrity.

Fulcrum IT developed and delivered both live and online training to support the solution.